DoorDash is buying rival Instacart in a deal worth roughly $17 billion, signaling that the delivery wars continues to heat up.
The deal, announced Thursday, marks an end for Instacart as an independent company. Instacart went public in 2023 and benefited from a pandemic-era boom for the grocery delivery service, but it has struggled to maintain its momentum against larger competitors, like Uber, Amazon and Walmart.
DoorDash said in a press release that the combined company “will offer grocers and retailers of every size DoorDash’s delivery network and Instacart’s grocery and fulfillment technology.”
DoorDash has been expanding its suite of services beyond meal delivery, including adding restaurant reservations and delivery products beyond food, striking partnerships with Home Depot and Sephora. Now, it can increase its business with more grocery options, too.
“Grocery is one of the hardest things to get right online. Someone has to pick a ripe avocado, find a substitute you’d choose yourself, and get the ice cream to you before it melts,” Tony Xu, the cofounder and CEO of DoorDash said in a statement.
He added that Instacart “has spent years learning to do that well for grocers, while DoorDash has built a delivery network and technology that local stores rely on every day. Together, we could give stores of every size more of those tools and unlock the potential of grocery delivery.”
The deal is a mix of cash and stock, with DoorDash paying $65 per share, marking a roughly 25% premium from Instacart’s October 22 close when media reports said that it was mulling a sale.
The companies are touting the benefits of the combination, including that people won’t have to buy two membership programs (DashPass and Instacart+), which could save its customers an “estimated $100 million per year on membership fees alone.”
But there’s already opposition to the deal, with the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP), an anti-monopoly advocacy group, pushing regulators to block the deal because it would control nearly 60% of the third-party grocery delivery market.
“Instacart and Doordash have spent the better part of a decade bullying main street businesses and denying fair pay and benefits to their combined 9 million workers,” said Lee Hepner, Senior Legal Counsel at the AELP, in a statement. “This merger represents the next frontier of data-driven abuse, exploiting massive asymmetries of power to squeeze worker compensation on the way in and drain consumer wallets on the way out.”
The combination, which is expected to close in the coming months, is one of many in the delivery space. Grubhub’s US business was sold to Wonder for $650 million in 2025, and Uber bought European company Delivery Hero this summer for $14.8 billion. In 2020, Uber bought Postmates for $2.65 billion.
