Investment Case Update: December 8, 2025

Price: $44.50 (12/8/25)
Market Capitalization: $11.7B
Enterprise Value:$10.1B

What the Company Does

Maplebear, which conducts business as Instacart, provides online grocery shopping and delivery. The company currently has more than 1,800 business partnerships with grocers, including 24 of the top 25 grocers in North America, allowing it to reach over 98% of households in this region. 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 fees on these online grocery orders and advertisements/promotions for various consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands sold at its retail partners’ stores.

Why We Own It

CART offers compelling growth prospects as only ~13% of the $1.3T North America grocery market occurs online, lagging ecommerce penetration rates (i.e. what % of sales occur online) of other major retail categories, while management thinks it can potentially reach 35% over the long term. Although some sell-side analysts believe the company will lose market share to competitors like Doordash and Uber Eats, CART continues to dominate large-basket ($75+ order value) orders with a >70% market share, and management noted that they and are “multiples better” at converting small-basket (<$75 order value) customers to large basket orders than other platforms. CART’s focus on larger orders (average order value of ~$114 in 2024) drives superior unit economics relative to convenience-focused peers, as CART can spread fixed fulfillment costs over more items, boosting gross profit per order, while the inherently longer shopping sessions enable strong engagement opportunities for its higher-margin ad business. However, CART’s value proposition is increasingly extending beyond its core marketplace business. Recent off-platform partnerships with partners such as TikTok and Pinterest broaden the reach of its fast-scaling ads business, now generating >$1B in annual run-rate revenue across 7,500 brands. At the same time, CART’s Enterprise Platform, which provides the white-label technology that powers the ecommerce sites for 350+ retailers, embeds CART deeper into its partners’ tech stacks, allowing CART to capture demand and monetization across retailers’ full digital ecosystems, limiting the impact of non-exclusive retailers that work with other third-party delivery providers.

CART’s fundamentals remain strong, with management guiding for 10% Y/Y growth in Gross Transaction Value (GTV), or aggregate order volume on CART’s platform, which would mark eight consecutive quarters of at least 9% growth. Meanwhile, CART continues to gain operating leverage, as Adjusted EBITDA margins are expected to expand another 250bps in FY25 following 510bps of expansion in FY24, as management progresses towards its long-term target of Adjusted EBITDA representing 4.5% of GTV (vs. 3.0% in 3Q25). Despite CART’s superior unit economics and strong growth outlook, shares trade at a forward (FY25) EV/EBITDA multiple of ~9.4x, a more than 50% discount to both UBER and DASH.

How Management Allocates Capital

Management’s top priority is to invest excess cash into R&D and marketing to fuel organic growth. However, with a pristine balance sheet and a net cash position of $1.7B, management has significant flexibility to pursue accretive M&A and opportunistically tap into its $1.8B of remaining share buyback authorization (15.3% of market cap), while also meeting its required reinvestments into the business, even after buying back $277MM worth of shares over the last four quarters (2.4% of market cap).

We originally posted our investment case for CART on May 6, 2024.