DoorDash has agreed to buy Instacart in the largest acquisition in its history. The two companies announced on Thursday that DoorDash will acquire Maplebear Inc., which does business as Instacart, for 65 dollars a share, an equity value of approximately 17 billion dollars. The price is a 26 percent premium to Instacart’s closing share price on October 22, the last trading day before media reports of a possible transaction.
The structure is set out in the merger agreement dated October 28, 2026, among DoorDash, its wholly owned Ibiza Merger Sub and Maplebear, filed with both companies’ 8-K reports on Thursday. For each Instacart share, holders can elect 65 dollars in cash, 0.3372 shares of DoorDash Class A common stock, or a mixed consideration of 48.75 dollars in cash plus 0.08430 DoorDash shares. Shares for which no election is made convert into the cash consideration. In aggregate, at least 75 percent of the consideration will be cash and DoorDash stock is capped at 25 percent of the total, with proration if stock elections are oversubscribed. Instacart’s board approved the agreement unanimously, and stockholders holding about 19 percent of its shares have agreed to vote in favour.
DoorDash expects to fund the cash portion from cash on hand and debt financing, and has a commitment letter from JPMorgan Chase Bank for a 364-day senior unsecured bridge loan facility. The transaction is not subject to a financing condition, and DoorDash said it is targeting a capital structure that maintains investment grade ratings. The agreement carries the standard machinery for a deal of this size: a no-solicitation covenant on Instacart, stockholder meeting and registration obligations, and termination provisions in Article VII.
Closing is a long way off. The companies expect the transaction to close at the end of 2027 or in the first half of 2028, subject to approval by Instacart stockholders, expiry or termination of the Hart-Scott-Rodino antitrust waiting period, and other regulatory approvals including in Canada and Israel. DoorDash will file a Form S-4 registration statement containing Instacart’s proxy statement. Until closing, the two companies continue to operate separately and independently.
The stated logic is reach. DoorDash said Instacart customers would be able to shop at more than 50,000 additional stores beyond the nearly 100,000 already on Instacart’s platform, that members of DashPass and Instacart+ would pay one membership fee instead of two, saving an estimated 100 million dollars a year, and that it expects to keep Instacart’s brand, app and enterprise technology products after closing. Local grocers will be free to work with any delivery platform, with no grocery exclusivity, and Instacart’s shoppers will keep the features they use to choose batches. In its third quarter results, released the same day, DoorDash said it sees a multi year path to 500 million dollars or more of annual synergies from the transaction, net of investments, with investment exceeding total synergies in the first year after closing and positive net synergies from the second year.
The announcement landed alongside record DoorDash results. For the quarter ended September 30, 2026, total orders rose 28 percent to 993 million, marketplace gross order value rose 36 percent to 33.9 billion dollars, and revenue rose 34 percent to 4.6 billion dollars. The company guided fourth quarter marketplace gross order value to between 35.4 billion and 36.4 billion dollars.