Who Owns Instacart? Shareholders, Founders and Who’s in Charge (2026)
Instacart is owned by the public shareholders of its parent company, Maplebear Inc., which has traded on Nasdaq under the ticker CART since September 2023. No one controls it: the biggest holders are D1 Capital, Sequoia Capital, founder Apoorva Mehta, Vanguard and BlackRock, each with somewhere between about 6% and 10%.
Day to day, the company is run by Chris Rogers, who has been CEO since August 2025 and chair since November 2025. Amazon has no stake.
Key takeaways
Who owns Instacart’s parent company, Maplebear?
Maplebear is the legal company; Instacart is the brand. If you buy CART stock, you’re buying a slice of Maplebear.
Because Maplebear is public, ownership is spread across thousands of funds and individuals. Institutions hold about 85% of the shares. The table below shows the largest disclosed holders, with values at roughly $60 a share; CART closed at $60.88 on October 26, 2026.
| Shareholder | Stake | Approx. value | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| D1 Capital Partners | ~9.6% (22.6M shares) | ~$1.36B | 13F, Q2 2026 |
| Sequoia Capital | 8.0% (18.6M) | ~$1.12B | 13D/A, Aug 17, 2026 |
| Apoorva Mehta (founder) | ~7.5% (17.4M) plus 4.9M options | ~$1.04B | 13G/A, June 2025 |
| Vanguard (two units) | ~6.8% combined (16.0M) | ~$0.96B | 13F, Q2 2026 |
| BlackRock | 6.6% (15.9M) | ~$0.96B | 13G/A, Mar 31, 2026 |
Percentages use about 231.5 million shares outstanding as of July 31, 2026. Mehta’s figure is from his last filing and may have changed; he isn’t required to report every sale now that he’s off the board.
Largest Maplebear shareholders, % of shares
All bars use the same scale. These five hold about 39% together; thousands of other funds and individuals hold the other ~61%. Founder shown in lighter blue. Sources: SEC filings and Q2 2026 13F data.
What is Instacart worth to its owners?
About $14 billion, based on roughly 231.5 million shares at around $60 each in late October 2026. That’s a recovery from the IPO but still far below the company’s peak private price.
- March 2021: private funding round values Instacart at $39 billion
- September 2023: IPO at $30 a share, about $10 billion
- October 2026: roughly $14 billion
Anyone who bought in at the 2021 valuation is still down about 64% on paper. Early backers like Sequoia and Mehta, who got in years earlier at much lower prices, are sitting on large gains, which is why the in-kind distributions make sense for them now.
Is Instacart owned by Amazon?
No. Amazon has never owned Instacart, and no public filing shows it holding shares. The two are competitors in grocery delivery.
The confusion probably comes from Whole Foods. It was one of Instacart’s biggest partners until Amazon bought the chain, and the two wound down their US delivery partnership starting in February 2019, CNBC reported. Amazon runs its own grocery delivery inside Prime, which is part of how Amazon makes money from subscriptions.
Walmart, the other big rival, sells delivery through its own Walmart+ membership, and no filing shows it holding Instacart shares either. Its biggest owner is the Walton family, as our look at who owns Walmart explains.
Legal, voting and management control
Legal owner: Maplebear Inc., a public company headquartered at 50 Beale Street in San Francisco.
Voting control: Shareholders, one vote per share. Maplebear’s 2026 proxy highlights that it has no multi-class voting structure, unlike Meta or Alphabet, where founders keep control with super-voting stock.
Management: Chris Rogers is chair and CEO. Because the CEO also chairs the board, independent director Ravi Gupta serves as lead independent director.
My take: Instacart is one of the cleaner ownership stories among big consumer tech companies. Nobody can overrule the board through special shares, so the large funds and the share price decide its direction.
Why Sequoia’s stake keeps shrinking
Sequoia is a long-time Instacart backer and was its largest disclosed holder for most of the time since the IPO. In 2026 it started handing its shares to its own limited partners, a standard way venture firms return money after an IPO.
- May 7, 2026: 11.9% (27.9 million shares)
- August 12, 2026: 9.5%, after an in-kind distribution of about 6.1 million shares
- August 17, 2026: 8.0% (18.6 million shares), per its latest Schedule 13D/A
No sales were reported. The shares simply moved from Sequoia’s funds to its investors, who can now hold or sell them. That’s why D1 Capital, the hedge fund, is now the largest single holder.
What did Apoorva Mehta do?
Mehta founded Instacart in 2012, joined by Max Mullen and Brandon Leonardo. He got into Y Combinator despite missing the application deadline by two months, Fortune reported, a path many founders still follow through startup accelerators.
He was CEO until August 2021, when Fidji Simo took over, then served as executive chairman. He left the board when Instacart went public, but he kept a big stake. He sold about $21 million of stock in the IPO and remained the largest individual shareholder, Fortune reported. At his June 2025 filing he held 17.4 million shares through a trust and a holding company, plus 4.9 million exercisable options, or 8.4% of the company counting those options.
Max Mullen and Brandon Leonardo don’t appear among the top disclosed holders. Fortune reported at the IPO that each owned about 2%, but neither has filed since, so their current stakes aren’t public.
Who runs Instacart now?
Fidji Simo led Instacart from 2021 through its IPO, then left in 2025 to run applications at OpenAI. She stayed on as chair through the handover and resigned from the board on November 24, 2025.
Her successor, Chris Rogers, joined Instacart in 2019 from Apple, where he ran the Canadian business, and was previously its chief business officer. He took over as CEO on August 15, 2025.
What is the CEO’s salary at Instacart?
Rogers’ total pay for 2025 was about $29.8 million, according to the AFL-CIO’s Paywatch tally of proxy data, or 585 times the median Instacart employee. Most of that is stock awards, not cash salary.
Why did Instacart get sued?
The two cases people ask about most are about pay and pricing. In 2017, Instacart paid $4.6 million to settle a class action claiming it misclassified its shoppers as independent contractors.
In December 2025 it agreed to pay $60 million in consumer refunds to settle a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit. According to the FTC’s December 18 announcement, the agency alleged that Instacart advertised “free delivery” while adding service fees of up to 15%, offered a “100% satisfaction guarantee” that usually meant a small credit, and charged people for Instacart+ after free trials without clear consent.
Instacart denied wrongdoing, TechCrunch reported. Neither case changed who owns the company.
FAQ
Is Instacart a publicly traded company?
Yes. Its parent, Maplebear Inc., has been listed on Nasdaq under the ticker CART since September 2023. Anyone with a brokerage account can buy shares, which makes them a small part-owner with one vote per share, the same voting rights per share that D1 or Sequoia get.
Is Instacart owned by a grocery chain?
No. Grocery chains like Costco, Kroger and Aldi are partners that sell through Instacart’s app and pay it for orders and advertising, not owners. None of them appears among the large disclosed shareholders. Control sits with public shareholders, led by funds like D1, Sequoia and BlackRock.
How do I contact Instacart’s CEO?
There’s no public direct line to Chris Rogers. Customer and shopper issues go through Instacart’s in-app help center. Investors can reach the company through its investor relations site, and formal shareholder letters go to Maplebear’s head office at 50 Beale Street, San Francisco.
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