Instacart set for Wall Street debut days after Arm's fiery entry

[September 19, 2023]  (Reuters) - Shares of grocery delivery app Instacart were set to start trading on the Nasdaq on Tuesday, the second high-profile debut in days after SoftBank's Arm Holdings entered Wall Street with a bang.

A strong debut, like chip designer Arm and RayzeBio had last week, could encourage other startups to test the waters and potentially revive the IPO market after a near 18-month dry spell.  

Instacart employee Eric Cohn, 34, navigates a Safeway grocery store while preparing a delivery order while wearing a respirator mask to help protect himself and slow the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Tucson, Arizona, U.S., April 4, 2020. Picture taken April 4, 2020. REUTERS/Cheney Orr/File Photo

San Francisco-based Instacart priced its IPO at the top end of its raised range of $28 to $30 and raked in a total of $660 million in proceeds, out of which $237 million will go to investors who are selling some of their shares alongside the company.

The offering gave Instacart a valuation of nearly $9.9 billion, a fraction of the $39 billion it was worth in 2021, the company's last funding round.

Instacart is debuting almost three years after kicking off preparations for going public and several startups have had to take a cut to their valuations since 2022 as inflation, geopolitical tensions and the Federal Reserve's rapid rate hikes soured the economic climate.

The company's long slog to Nasdaq featured some key moments.

In 2021, its co-founder Apoorva Mehta stepped down after seven years at the helm and named Fidji Simo, the former head of Meta's Facebook app, its CEO.

Its core business also turned profitable in 2022, and the trend has continued in the first six months of 2023, the company disclosed in its regulatory filing last month.

Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan are the lead underwriters for Instacart's IPO.

(Reporting by Niket Nishant in Bengaluru; Editing by Devika Syamnath)

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