Maplebear Inc

OVERVIEW

Instacart is powering the future of grocery through technology. We partner with retailers to help them successfully navigate the digital transformation of their businesses.

Instacart was founded in 2012 to bring the grocery industry online and help make grocery shopping effortless. We started by understanding what consumers want and then built enterprise-grade technologies that allow retailers to meet those needs. We want to enable any retailer, large or small, to drive success both online and in-store and serve their customers better in all of the ways they choose to shop. As of December 31, 2023, more than 1,500 national, regional, and local retail banners partner with Instacart. We have demonstrated our ability to help our retail partners drive strong growth and stay competitive in a complex and increasingly digital industry.

Instacart invented a new model for online grocery shopping by offering consumers on-demand delivery from the stores they know and trust. Retailers reach customers through both Instacart Marketplace, where customers can shop from their favorite retailers through our app or website, and retailers’ owned and operated online storefronts that are powered by Instacart Enterprise Platform, our end-to-end technology solution encompassing eCommerce, fulfillment, Connected Stores, ads and marketing, and insights.

When shopping for groceries, consumers want selection, quality, value, and convenience, and they shop in many different ways. Instacart started as a way for households to conveniently manage their weekly grocery shopping, a recurring and high order value consumer use case. Today, customers can place orders for delivery or pickup across a variety of use cases including the weekly shop, bulk stock-up, convenience, and special occasions. Customers can select the fulfillment option and speed that best serve their needs. For example, a busy parent may prefer the reliability of having their family’s groceries delivered every Sunday, but if they need a few items in the middle of the week, they can trust Instacart to help deliver the items they need with priority delivery (as fast as 30 minutes). Each order can be shopped for and delivered with care by one of the hundreds of thousands of shoppers who value the flexible earnings opportunities that Instacart provides.

As consumers and retailers move online, brands can use Instacart Ads as a new way to reach customers at the point of purchase and within minutes of delivery and consumption. As of December 31, 2023, more than 5,500 brands are using Instacart Ads and are now more easily discoverable as customers fill their digital carts. Instacart Ads offers brands a highly measurable ads offering that leverages first-party transaction data to move products off of store shelves more efficiently.

Instacart is built for the entire grocery ecosystem, improving the experiences for each of our constituents and helping them succeed:

•Retailers. We enable more than 1,500 retail banners to grow by providing technology that can accelerate the digital transformation of their entire business.

•Customers. As of December 31, 2023, we reach over 95% of households in North America, and help our customers shop at their favorite retailers and enjoy selection, quality, value, and convenience. Our membership program, Instacart+, offers expanded customer benefits including unlimited free delivery on orders over a certain size, a reduced service fee, credit back on eligible pickup orders, and exclusive benefits.

•Brands. We represent one of the largest and fast growing eCommerce channels for brands. We provide discovery and attractive ROI for over 5,500 brands through our industry-leading advertising tools and insights purpose-built for the online grocery category. We estimate that on average, our ads deliver more than a 15% incremental sales lift, and in some cases twice that, for our brand partners.(1)

(1) Based on internal tests run across all brand partners using our Sponsored Product ads offering in the year ended December 31, 2023 and individual tests run for select brands or types of brands.

•Shoppers. As of December 31, 2023, we offer approximately 600,000 shoppers an immediate, flexible earnings opportunity that allows them to choose when and how much to work.(2) Shoppers are deeply valued members of the Instacart community, and we strive to make the shopping experience as seamless as possible and protect shoppers while they work.

INSTACART TECHNOLOGY

We built Instacart to serve the entire grocery ecosystem. The key pillars of our technology are Instacart Marketplace, Instacart Enterprise Platform, and Instacart Ads. Our solutions are underpinned by a shared foundation of technology, infrastructure, data insights, and fulfillment that leverages our scale and expertise specific to the grocery category. Our technology solutions are better together. Since our founding, Instacart has powered more than one billion orders. This scale gives us unique insights into consumer buying behavior, needs, and trends across the entire grocery industry in North America. We then utilize these insights to enhance Instacart Enterprise Platform, ensuring retailers can best meet their customers’ needs across their owned and operated online and physical storefronts. Similarly, Instacart Enterprise Platform enhances Instacart Marketplace, as our deep integration with retailers allows us to expand marketplace capabilities for our customers.

Enabling a digital grocery experience is highly complex. Our machine learning algorithms process billions of data points each day(3) to optimize a range of decisions and tasks, including basket building, merchandising, personalization, ads quality, demand forecasting, order fulfillment, shopper fleet mobilization, dispatching, routing, fraud costs, and appeasements per order. Our technology and data insights drive efficiencies for retailers, customers, brands, and shoppers. Furthermore, we have designed our technology infrastructure to scale in real time to accommodate demand spikes. We work with multiple third parties that provide cloud hosting services that allow us to quickly and efficiently scale our technology.

We collect billions of data points across millions of orders each quarter, more than one billion searches, billions of Sponsored Product ads impressions, hundreds of millions of shopper-customer interactions, and facilitate orders fulfilled from over 85,000 stores.(3)

Instacart Marketplace

We launched Instacart Marketplace in 2012, through which we help customers find their favorite products, provide an innovative ad business that inspires people to try new brands, connect customers to our dedicated shopper community, and help retailers and customers build deeper relationships. We help retailers serve their customers’ needs as to how and where they want to shop by supporting a wide array of fulfillment options, shopping occasions, and categories.

Instacart Enterprise Platform

Instacart Enterprise Platform is an end-to-end technology solution that powers retailers across all aspects of their business. Our offerings are modular, allowing retail partners to pick and choose which technologies best fit their needs. These solutions work seamlessly together, so retailers can more efficiently integrate with Instacart than they can with multiple separate technologies. Key components of Instacart Enterprise Platform include:

•eCommerce. We power world class eCommerce storefronts for more than 600 retail banners and services as of December 31, 2023, from product discovery tools, to merchandising, to different payment models, to loyalty-as-a-service.

•Fulfillment. We help retailers fulfill grocery orders directly from their stores through our community of dedicated shoppers. Retailers — from national and regional retailers to local mainstays — can leverage our fulfillment API to help fulfill orders that are placed through their owned and operated online storefronts. In most instances, Instacart shoppers pick, pack, and deliver these orders, but retailers can also use our technology to enable orders that are picked and packed by their own employees, or use a combination of the two.

(2)Based on shoppers who completed at least one order during the month ended December 31, 2023.

(3) For the quarter ended December 31, 2023. Number of stores as of December 31, 2023.

•Connected Stores. Instacart helps retailers create a unified, seamless, and personalized experience across their online and in-store footprints by leveraging technologies like Caper Carts, Scan & Pay, Lists, Carrot Tags, FoodStorm, and Out of Stock Insights.

•Ads and Marketing. Carrot Ads, our enterprise ads offering, brings the best of Instacart Ads to retailers’ owned and operated online storefronts and apps. This opens up new revenue streams for retailers and increases the profitability of online orders. Our retail partners can also utilize our suite of marketing solutions, from self-serve tools to fully customized strategic partnerships, to grow their business by serving targeted promotions to customers.

•Insights. Insights gives retailers near real-time visibility into their operations. By enabling visibility into key metrics like item popularity, inventory levels and availability, order sizes, delivery times, delivery ratings, and sales, Insights helps retailers optimize operations and provide better customer experiences.

Instacart Ads

Instacart Ads combines the best of digital advertising — precision, actionability, and measurability — with the ability to directly move products off the shelves at stores, getting these products into the hands of customers within hours. Because it offers brands a way to reach customers at the point of purchase and within minutes of delivery and consumption, our solution delivers highly measurable and strong ROI across all parts of the customer shopping journey, from awareness to consideration to purchase. We have a wide breadth of advertising solutions, including Sponsored Product ads, display ads, coupons, and brand pages, to meet all of our brand partners’ needs. Instacart Ads also enables brands to learn more about general consumer behavior from discovery to purchase, offering valuable insights about how to optimize their advertising spend.

We are not only building our advertising solutions to benefit brands, but also customers and retailers. We believe Instacart Ads delivers a superior shopping experience and improves pricing for customers by giving them access to thousands of deals and discounts, which in turn drives larger average order values for our retail partners. Retailers are also able to leverage Carrot Ads, an Instacart Enterprise Platform product that brings Instacart Ads to retailers’ own eCommerce sites and expands the customer reach available to our brand partners.

Shopper App

We offer shoppers a mobile application (iOS and Android) that powers the entire shopper experience seamlessly.

•Getting Started. Shoppers can download our mobile app and sign up within minutes. Onboarding includes entering a valid driver’s license, contact information, and taking a picture. Following a thorough background check, shoppers are provided with a virtual credit card and can begin shopping and earning the same day.

•Batch Information. We give shoppers upfront information about each batch they view on Instacart. We tell them how much they will earn from Instacart, the estimated customer tip, number and type of items, store details, estimated driving distances, and more. Our batching algorithm offers shoppers chances to take multiple orders at once to maximize earnings.

•Picking Technology. Once in a store, our shopper app recommends how to pick the highest-quality produce and the best replacement if an item is out of stock. Our picking technology is optimized for the complexities of grocery, where one order could include a bunch of kale, several ripe avocados, a pint of ice cream, and a pound of steak.

•Shopper-Customer Chat. We provide shoppers with a number of in-app tools to help them communicate directly with customers to improve the quality of their shopping experience. Shoppers can send photos to customers and inquire directly about replacements, refunds, or other clarifications to give customers the chance to decide what would make their orders complete. This technology is informed by hundreds of millions of shopper-customer interactions.

•Batching and Delivery. Our fulfillment technology facilitates order allocations and suggests optimal routes to reduce the total time a shopper is on a delivery. Our algorithms based on billions of data points decide in real time how to take customer orders and create the most efficient batch offers for shoppers, in order to maximize earnings opportunities. Our machine learning simulations run every minute to re-compute the optimal combination of batch offers.

•Peak Earning Times. We give shoppers valuable information about the days and times that will offer the highest earning opportunities in specific areas through our Peak Earning Times feature. This helps shoppers plan for the week ahead and maximize their earnings potential.

OUR GROWTH STRATEGIES

We plan to continue to grow by delivering the best online grocery experience to more customers, increasing the number of retailers we partner with and deepening our relationships with existing retail partners, and increasing our advertising revenue.

•Attract New Customers and Expand Use Cases. We will continue to help retail partners capture new customers as consumer behaviors and preferences shift. We are focused on the following avenues to achieve this:

◦Grow Online Penetration. We plan to invest in incentives, performance and brand marketing, and partnerships to grow our customer base and expand the online grocery market.

◦Expand Omni-Channel Offerings. We began with delivery but have since introduced pickup and in-store capabilities, including AI-powered Caper Carts.

◦Introduce New Use Cases and Broaden Selection. We will continue to broaden grocery shopping occasions, grocery-adjacent verticals, and tailor our offering for additional shopping use cases, like Instacart Business.

◦Increase Access. We will continue to offer a wide range of fulfillment options, including pickup, no rush delivery, and next day delivery, that are more affordable relative to other fulfillment options. We will continue to work with our brand partners to expand our offerings of exclusive coupons and deals and with retailers to offer item price parity to their physical stores and retailer loyalty program benefits whenever possible. We will leverage partnerships to augment these savings and deals through mechanisms like cashback and trial Instacart+ memberships. We also offer diverse payment types, such as EBT SNAP, FSA and HSA acceptance, Medicare advantage payments, and recent initiatives like Fresh Funds through Instacart Health.

◦Grow Instacart+. We will continue to invest in Instacart+, our membership program, to drive greater customer engagement and deliver savings back to our most loyal customers.

◦Expand AI Applications. We believe we are well positioned to lead AI product innovation in the online grocery space and further increase engagement on Instacart. We have a robust machine learning foundation with a large amount of unique data across our retailers, product catalog, and customers. We intend to leverage this data to continue to develop AI models for deep personalization and a better customer experience. With the rapid innovation in generative AI, we believe we can create new personalized, inspirational, value-driven shopping experiences that enrich our customers’ relationship with food and how they engage with the retailers and brands they love.

•Deepen Our Offerings to Retailers. We plan to continue to help retailers grow by enabling new use cases and broadening the capabilities of our technology solutions. We are focused on the following strategies to achieve this:

◦Expand Use Cases and Capabilities. We plan to continue to help retailers grow by enabling new use cases and broadening the capabilities of our technology solutions.

◦Pursue Opportunistic Acquisitions. We plan to pursue next-generation technologies via organic and inorganic opportunities. To complement our internal development, we will look to make opportunistic acquisitions that bolster our technology solutions and key capabilities like we have successfully done with Caper, which offers AI-powered shopping carts for a seamless in-store check-out experience, FoodStorm, which offers a SaaS order management system, that powers end-to-end online order ahead and catering capabilities for grocery retailers, Eversight, Inc. (“Eversight”), which offers AI-powered technology to create compelling savings opportunities for customers in real-time, and Rosie Applications Inc.(“Rosie”), which provides eCommerce storefront experiences specifically for local, independent retailers.

◦Extend Our Technology Beyond Grocery. The suite of offerings we have built for grocery is also extensible to other categories of retailers, and over time, we anticipate that we will partner with a greater number of non-grocery retailers.

◦Pursue International Opportunities. We believe that we have built a set of unique technologies that all grocers worldwide could benefit from, and over the long term, we intend to leverage our technology and existing partnerships to expand our business internationally.

•Increase Brand Success and Support Emerging Brands. We will continue to build ads offerings to provide brand partners with new ways to connect with customers shopping online and in-store. We have seen our advertising revenue grow rapidly over the last few years given our customer reach and the high ROI of advertising dollars on Instacart. We are focused on the following strategies to achieve this:

◦Increase Advertising and Other Investment Rate. Increasing advertising and other investment rate (which we define as advertising and other revenue in a given period divided by GTV in such period) will come from existing brands spending more with us, acquisition of new advertisers as we expand ads offerings availability across new categories, and growing sales for emerging brands and non-food categories that have higher advertising budgets.

◦Add More Emerging Brands. Emerging brands have a high desire to invest as they look to grow brand awareness and engage with customers.

◦New Ads Offerings. We will continue to build our display ads offerings to include rich media discovery opportunities for our brands to reach customers in new and impactful ways, including collections of shoppable products brand pages to serve as destinations for on- and offsite media. We will also continue to invest in optimization and measurement capabilities to align with brands’ objectives across the marketing funnel, building on recently launched capabilities like optimized bidding to help to maximize sales. We also have an exciting opportunity to use our data and insights to build a retail media network off platform. By partnering with Google, The Trade Desk, Roku and more, we are starting to help brands create more performant and targeted campaigns across search, social, programmatic, connected TV, or linear TV platforms.

◦Expand Our Advertising Technology to More Retailers’ Sites. We are investing to expand Instacart Ads to retailers’ owned and operated online storefronts through Carrot Ads, which helps our retail partners capture new monetization opportunities while broadening advertiser reach to millions of new customers via additional relevant placements on retailers’ owned and operated online storefronts.

SALES AND MARKETING

While our brand and leading market position enable us to benefit from organic, word-of-mouth growth, we use sales and marketing to attract retailers, customers, brands, and shoppers and grow the pie for all of our constituents.

Consumer Marketing

We have built an efficient sales and marketing engine to support our organic motion and drive growth. As we have continued to grow, we have developed a broader set of marketing strategies to attract consumers to, and increase their engagement with, Instacart. We run digital marketing campaigns across search engines, social media platforms, and programmatic advertising outlets. We have a CRM platform that allows us to coordinate and manage our email campaigns, push notifications, and in-app messaging. We run referral coupons and bonuses to incentivize customers to invite their family, friends, and connections to join Instacart. We also offer promotions or incentives to prospective customers, using targeted offers to increase adoption and engagement.

Finally, we are experimenting with an even broader set of marketing channels and tactics, including television, streaming audio, direct mail, billboards, and in-store marketing.

Our marketing efforts drive sales for our retail and brand partners. We also collaborate to run co-marketing initiatives with retailers and brands to attract new customers. As an extension of their existing offline businesses, we give retailers the opportunity to participate in promotional efforts to drive consumer to sign up for Instacart and shop their owned and operated online storefront. We are building out business-to-business marketing capabilities to support partnerships and sales to both retailers and brands, including events, content, sales enablement, and CRM.

To date, the majority of customers have come to Instacart through organic channels. We believe we have a significant opportunity to build awareness to fuel new customer acquisition, and we plan to prudently invest in brand marketing and other awareness campaigns in the future.

Retail Partnerships

We maintain a dedicated account management team that identifies and onboards new retailers and broadens adoption of our offerings. Our account management team ensures retailers are as supported by and successful on Instacart as possible. They work hand-in-hand with counterparts inside retailers’ organizations ranging from product to marketing to operations teams to ensure we are delivering the value we promise. For our larger accounts, our onboarding process and initial integrations are bespoke, which helps us best serve those retailers’ specific needs. For all other accounts, we offer an efficient onboarding process onto Instacart Marketplace or Instacart Enterprise Platform that allows them to access customers quickly.

Brand Partnerships

We maintain a dedicated sales team that identifies and onboards new advertisers. An increasing portion of new advertisers are onboarded and managed through an automated self-service solution, which allows advertisers to sign up, set up a campaign built to meet specific targets set by the advertiser, manage marketing spend, and achieve incremental sales all in the same day.

Our sales team works closely with our account management team to ensure that advertisers understand how our ads offerings work, receive actionable performance trends, and make adjustments to enhance the value they derive from Instacart.

Shopper Marketing

We maintain a dedicated shopper marketing team that attracts new shoppers as well as retains and engages our existing shopper base by using referral coupons, promotional campaigns, and evergreen engagement programs. Referral coupons are given to encourage shoppers to recommend Instacart to their connections. Promotional campaigns use shopper incentives to drive shopper activation and engagement. Evergreen engagement programs include our onboarding series, focus groups, and shopper commitment initiatives, among others.

COMPETITION

The markets in which we operate are highly competitive. We compete for retailers, customers, brands, and shoppers across each offering of our end-to-end technology suite based on a number of factors:

•Retailers. We compete for retailers based on factors such as the quality of our technology including performance, flexibility, ease of use, scalability, reliability, pricing, breadth of fulfillment capabilities, our ability to innovate, quality of support, and other professional services and ability to meet their needs in a cost-efficient manner.

•Customers. We compete for customers based on factors such as the quality of customer experience, selection, quality, pricing, value, and convenience.

•Brands. We compete for brands based on factors such as the breadth of our offerings, technology capabilities, ease of use, strength of data insights and analytics, our ability to innovate, consumer reach, and pricing.

•Shoppers. We compete for shoppers based on factors such as flexibility, earnings potential, safety and overall experience, and our brand.

New services and offerings from competitors, trends in consumer shopping behavior, the subsiding effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and its variants, macroeconomic factors, and other conditions, events, trends, or circumstances also impact our ability to compete for each of our constituents.

For additional information about the risks to our business related to competition, see the section titled “Risk Factors—Risks Related to Our Business and Industry—The markets in which we participate are highly and increasingly competitive, with well-capitalized and better-known competitors, some of which are also partners. If we are unable to compete effectively, our business and financial prospects would be adversely impacted.”

GOVERNMENT REGULATION

We are subject to a wide variety of complex laws and regulations in the United States and other jurisdictions in which we operate. The laws and regulations govern many issues related to our business practices, including those regarding privacy, data security, data protection, pay and fee transparency, health information privacy and security, consumer protection, marketing and advertising, health and safety, food and product safety, zoning, sustainability, tax, insurance, employment, weights and measures, alcohol and other age-restricted products, worker classification, collective bargaining rights, internet usage and access, eCommerce, and electronic payments.

As we operate in a relatively new industry where clear guidance is not available for the interpretation and application of existing laws and regulations, these laws and regulations are constantly evolving and may be interpreted, applied, issued, enacted, superseded, or amended in a manner that could harm our business. These changes may occur immediately or develop over time through judicial decisions or as new guidance or interpretations are provided by regulatory, legislative, and governing bodies, such as federal, state, and local administrative agencies. As we expand our business into new markets or introduce new features, fulfillment methods, or offerings into existing markets, regulatory or legislative bodies or courts may claim that we or shoppers on Instacart are subject to additional requirements, or that we are prohibited from conducting business in certain jurisdictions.

Because we classify shoppers as independent contractors in the jurisdictions in which we operate, we are subject to a variety of local, municipal, state, federal, and international laws and regulations governing worker classification, compensation, pay and fee transparency, and payment and benefits rules. For example, in November 2020, voters in California voted in favor of, and on December 11, 2020, the California Secretary of State certified Proposition 22, which required gig economy companies like Instacart to, among other things, provide independent contractors working in California with a minimum level of earnings as well as healthcare subsidy payments. Therefore, our compliance with Proposition 22 has increased our costs in California and we expect such costs to remain elevated. Several other states in which we operate have and may continue to adopt legislation that provides for compensation and benefits for independent contractors similar to Proposition 22 or may challenge the status of independent contractors altogether. Regulations like this will impact our costs, may impair or prevent our ability to continue to operate, and may impact customer pricing and our ability to enable the same customer experience we have historically provided. Additionally, we are continually subject to administrative actions, government investigations, and other legal and regulatory proceedings at the federal, state, and municipal levels challenging the classification of shoppers as independent contractors, and claims that, by the alleged misclassification, we have violated various employment and other laws that would apply to employees. Laws and regulations that govern the status and classification of independent contractors are subject to change and divergent interpretations by various authorities, which can create uncertainty and unpredictability for us.

Our technology, and the user data from retailers, customers, brands, and shoppers that we collect and process to run our business, are an integral part of our business model and, as a result, our compliance with laws and regulations dealing with the collection, use, disclosure, and other processing of personal information is core to our strategy to improve our technology and user experience. Regulators and legislatures around the world have adopted or proposed increasingly stringent requirements regarding the collection, use, disclosure, transfer, security, storage, destruction, and other processing of personal information and other data. Regulators and private litigants are more actively enforcing these requirements, and violating them carries substantial penalties. Examples of such laws include the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 and related state laws, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, and various state privacy acts, including the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, the California Privacy Rights Act of 2020, and the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. In addition, expanding our business to European markets would subject us to some of the world’s most stringent data protection laws, including the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union and United Kingdom, which could limit our ability to do business in those markets.

See the section titled “Risk Factors—Risks Related to Our Legal and Regulatory Environment” for additional information about the laws and regulations we are subject to and the risks to our business associated with such laws and regulations.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Our intellectual property is an important component of our business. We rely on a combination of patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, license agreements, confidentiality procedures, non-disclosure agreements, employee non-disclosure and invention assignment agreements, and other legal and contractual rights to establish and protect our proprietary rights.

As of December 31, 2023, we had approximately 420 issued patents in the United States and approximately 520 patent applications (including active Patent Cooperation Treaty applications) pending in the United States and globally. While we believe our patents and patent applications in the aggregate are important to our competitive position, no single patent or patent application is material to us as a whole.

We have trademark rights in our name and other brand indicia, and have trademark registrations for select marks in the United States and other jurisdictions around the world. As of December 31, 2023, we also had approximately 130 copyright registrations. We also register domain names for certain websites that we use in our business, such as www.instacart.com, as well as similar variations to protect our brands and marks from cybersquatters. We continually review our development efforts to assess the existence and registrability of new intellectual property.

We control access to and use of our proprietary technology and other confidential information through the use of internal and external controls, including contractual protections with employees, contractors, customers, and partners. It is our practice to enter into confidentiality and invention assignment agreements (or similar agreements) with our employees, consultants, and contractors involved in the development of intellectual property on our behalf. We also enter into confidentiality agreements with other third parties in order to limit access to, and disclosure and use of, our confidential information and proprietary information. We further control the use of our proprietary technology and intellectual property through provisions in our terms of service. We intend to pursue additional actions to establish and protect our intellectual property rights to the extent we believe it would be beneficial and cost effective.

See the section titled “Risk Factors—Risks Related to Our Intellectual Property” for a more comprehensive description of risks related to our intellectual property.

HUMAN CAPITAL

As of December 31, 2023, we had a total of 3,380 full-time employees worldwide. We also engage with contractors, vendors, and consultants. We have invested substantial time and resources into building our team and believe that our employee relations are strong. Our success depends in large part on the efforts of our management, highly-skilled software engineers, sales personnel, and other professionals. Therefore, it is crucial that we continue to attract and retain high-performing employees from all demographics by providing competitive compensation and benefits, fostering a diverse, inclusive, and safe workplace, while making opportunities available for all our employees to grow and develop in their careers. Our board of directors and compensation committee oversee our human capital strategy, which is developed and managed under the leadership of our Chief Human Resources Officer, who reports to our Chief Executive Officer.

Compensating and Supporting Our Employees

Instacart is committed to providing equitable compensation opportunities and rewarding employees who achieve results, live our mission and values, and help others succeed. We also believe in supporting our employees’ personal and professional growth as well as their health and wellness.

Providing Equitable and Competitive Compensation. Our philosophy is to provide our employees with market competitive and equitable compensation that rewards high performance. To ensure equitable compensation for our employees, we consider external market data as well as internal parity considerations for all compensation decisions. Periodically, under the direction of legal counsel, we conduct comprehensive reviews of employee compensation to help ensure equitable pay. To incentivize high performance, we aim to reward eligible employees with pay increases and equity awards in recognition of their contributions. We believe our compensation practices help us attract and retain talented and diverse employees in a competitive labor market.

Supporting Our Employees. Our employees work hard to ensure the success of our business, and we know that hard work requires strong support. That is why we are deeply committed to investing in resources to help our employees grow and thrive. We take a holistic approach to supporting employee well-being through providing eligible employees and their eligible dependents with competitive health and wellness benefits, retirement savings, and work-life options tailored to help keep them and their families feeling their best. In addition, in 2022, we adopted our Flex First workforce model, which provides our eligible employees with the option to work remotely, in one of our offices, or a combination of both. We believe this provides our employees with the flexibility to support their personal needs while maintaining our high-performing and collaborative culture. We are also devoted to investing in the development of our employees through learning opportunities to help them achieve their personal and professional goals.

Fostering a Diverse Workforce and Cultivating a Culture of Belonging

One of our human capital priorities is building and maintaining a high performing, diverse workforce — one that reflects the diversity of our customers and partners — at every level of our organization. We have developed a number of initiatives throughout the employee life cycle to achieve this objective.

Supporting Representation that Reflects the Available Talent Pool. Our recruitment processes are intended to promote access to hiring opportunities for representative talent pools. For example, with limited exceptions, we require hiring managers of all mid and senior-level individual contributor and managerial roles to consider including at least one woman and one Black, Latinx, or Indigenous candidate at the panel interview stage. We have also implemented programs to attract talent from all backgrounds. For example, we offer conversations with members of our Employee Resource Groups (“ERGs”), to all candidates so they can get a better understanding of our culture. Lastly, we provide training to recruiters, hiring managers, and interviewers on equitable recruiting practices, with the goal of ensuring that all candidates are seen and evaluated fairly.

Ensuring Equitable Access to Opportunities while Minimizing Attrition. We recognize that hiring representative talent is just the first step; we also prioritize retaining underrepresented talent and work to ensure that all employees have equitable access to development, advancement, and internal opportunities. To help accomplish this, we support all of our managers with training and resources designed to help them create an inclusive environment within their teams. This includes fairly and equitably conducting performance reviews, considering promotion readiness, and, for eligible employees, providing opportunities for internal mobility. To better understand the needs of team members and identify retention opportunities, we offer proactive talent feedback sessions with our Diversity, Equity, and Belonging team to gather deeper insights into the experiences of team members and their career growth interests.

Fostering an Inclusive Environment. To ensure Instacart remains a welcoming environment for all employees, while also intentionally focusing on inclusion for historically marginalized talent and their advocates, we are constantly investing in our culture and creating opportunities to build community for all of our employees. Members of our executive team personally sponsor ERGs, which are employee-led groups that help create a more inclusive culture and amplify the voices of employees with shared identities and experiences across the company. Instacart allocates funding to our ERGs every year for programming and initiatives that range from professional development sessions and volunteer events to belonging and engagement opportunities. Additionally, in order to improve collaboration among diverse teams, we have invested in resources to educate our employees on building an inclusive culture and on recognizing and managing bias. We also regularly survey employees on how effective our leadership has been in creating an equitable and inclusive workplace to discover new opportunities to build an inclusive community.

CORPORATE INFORMATION

We were incorporated as Maplebear Inc. in Delaware in 2012, and we do business as Instacart. Our principal executive offices are located at 50 Beale Street, Suite 600, San Francisco, California 94105. Our telephone number is (888) 246-7822. Our corporate website address is www.instacart.com/company. We completed our initial public offering (“IPO”) in September 2023, and our common stock is listed on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol “CART.”

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

We intend to announce material information to the public through filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), on the investor relations page of our website, which is located at investors.instacart.com, our blog, which is located at www.instacart.com/company/blog, press releases, public conference calls, and public webcasts. The information disclosed through the foregoing channels could be deemed to be material information. As such, we encourage investors, the media, and others to follow the channels listed above and to review the information disclosed through such channels. We file electronically with the SEC, our Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K and amendments to these reports filed or furnished pursuant to Section13(a) or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (“Exchange Act”). We make available on our investor relations website, free of charge, copies of these reports and other information as soon as reasonably practicable after we file such material with or furnish it to the SEC. The SEC also maintains a website that contains our SEC filings at www.sec.gov.

We webcast our earnings calls and certain events we participate in or host with members of the investment community on our investor relations website. Additionally, we provide notifications of news or announcements regarding our financial performance, including SEC filings, investor events, press and earnings releases, as part of our investor relations website.

Information found on, or accessible through these websites is not part of, and is not incorporated into, this Annual Report on Form 10-K or in any other report or document we file.