Investment Case Update: September 16, 2026
Price: $46.85 (9/16/26)
Market Capitalization: $10.8B
Enterprise Value:$10.2B
What the Company Does
Maplebear, which conducts business as Instacart, is the leading pure-play online grocery shopping and delivery company in the United States, with >2,200 retailer partnerships, allowing it to reach over 98% of households in North America. Instacart’s platform allows its end consumers to shop at any of its retail grocer partners’ stores while offering customization options for delivery (same-day, next-day, priority, no rush, and pickup) with eventual fulfillment completed by one of the company’s 600K available “shoppers” (think “courier”). The company generates revenue via transaction and service fees on these online grocery orders, Instacart+ subscriptions, and advertisements/promotions for various consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands sold at its retail partners’ stores.
Why We Own It
CART is the leading service provider in a fragmented market ripe for a long pathway of disruption, while trading at a compelling valuation. With only ~13% of the $1.2T North America grocery market occurring online, management thinks it can potentially reach 35% over the long term. CART is the digital-first leader in online big-basket orders (order value of $75+) and is more effective than peers at converting small baskets into big baskets, which account for ~75% of online grocery orders. CART’s big-basket focus (~$110 average order value in FY25) drives superior unit economics relative to convenience-focused peers by spreading fulfillment costs across more items, boosting gross profit per order, while the inherently longer shopping sessions enable strong engagement opportunities for its higher-margin >$1B ads business. However, CART’s value proposition is increasingly extending beyond its core marketplace business. CART’s Enterprise Platform, which provides the white-label technology that powers the ecommerce sites for 380+ retailers, embeds CART deeper into its partners’ tech stacks, allowing CART to capture demand and monetization across retailers’ full digital ecosystems. FoodStorm is expanding CART’s reach into retailers’ higher-margin fresh and prepared-food categories, further limiting the impact of non-exclusive retailers that work with other third-party delivery providers. International markets provide another largely untapped growth lever, with the recent acquisition of Instaleap adding fulfillment orchestration and picking technology that helps CART adapt and export its proven product suite across new geographies.
Management expects Gross Transaction Value (GTV), or aggregate order volume on CART’s platform, to grow 14% Y/Y in 3Q26, which would mark eleven consecutive quarters of >9% growth. Underpinning this growth is steadily improving order quality, with CART reporting 16 consecutive quarters of Y/Y improvement in both its ability to find requested items and fulfill orders without errors. CART’s increasing scale is also driving significant operating leverage, with Adjusted EBITDA growing from 0.6% of GTV in FY22 to 2.9% in FY25, still well below management’s long-term target of 4.5%. Shares trade at a forward (FY26) EV/EBITDA multiple of just ~7.9x, representing a >42% discount to both UBER and DASH.
How Management Allocates Capital
Management’s top priority is to invest in R&D, AI solutions, and marketing to fuel organic growth. However, with a pristine balance sheet, management has significant flexibility to pursue accretive M&A and opportunistically tap into its ~$1B of remaining share buyback authorization (9.2% of market cap), while also meeting its required reinvestments into the business, even after buying back ~$3.5B worth of stock since the beginning of 2024 (31.9% of market cap).
We originally posted our investment case for CART on May 6, 2024.