Instacart priced its IPO at $30 a share late Tuesday, at the upper end of its expected range, a sign of investor appetite for new offerings.
The San-Francisco based company said late Monday that it sold 22 million shares at $30 each, matching the upper end of the $28 to $30 price range it had planned to offer. This sets the start-up’s valuation at $9.9 billion. The company is set to begin trading on the Nasdaq on Tuesday.
Instacart is one of the year’s most hotly watched IPOs, following the listing of chip designer
Arm Holdings
(ticker: ARM) last week. Taken together, they are expected to crack open the window for the IPO market, which has stayed rather dull for most of the year. Klaviyo, a marketing software company, is also set to come public this week.
Arm saw significant demand for its shares, with the stock opening 10% higher than its IPO price, but enthusiasm has since cooled. Shares fell 4.5% on Friday and closed down the same amount on Monday.
How Instacart trades Tuesday and beyond will depend on investors’ faith in the future of the gig economy’s expansion and profitability. Maplebear, as the Instacart parent is formally known, was founded in 2012. The company’s core business is to deliver groceries to homes with the help of contractors. It generated roughly a quarter of revenue last year from a new offering called Instacart Ads, where retailers pay to show sponsored ads to customers.
Instacart filed to go public on Aug. 25 after a long wait—the company had first filed a confidential registration statement for a potential IPO in May 2022.
Write to Karishma Vanjani at [email protected]
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