Instacart

Grocery delivery unicorn Instacart has now brought in former AdMob and Thumbtack executive Mark Schaaf as its Chief Technology Officer.

Schaaf built and led a team at Google’s mobile display ad business after the company acquired AdMob in 2009 before leaving in 2015 for e-commerce unicorn Thumbtack will now work on scaling Instacart’s engineering team as it furthers its operations.

With Schaaf’s long experience in marketplace businesses ranging from ad buying to outsourcing and now grocery delivery, Instacart would likely count his move as a great addition to its ecosystem.

“Thumbtack is a more consumer-focused marketplace with local service professionals and consumers, but Instacart gets even more complex,” said Schaaf. “It’s a four-sided marketplace, and then you overlay it with logistics. The goal is to make the physical world better with technology, and to build a tech core that solves a problem in the physical world.”

Instacart

Schaaf plans to double Instacart’s engineering team by the end of next year with a series of varioys marketplace dynamics put into play to keep the engineering team effective.

“When you think of all that, it brings up the classic engineering problem of the traveling salesman,” said Schaaf. “This will take a lot of data science modeling and algorithmic work, a lot of AI and machine learning, to make Instacart as efficient as possible.”

Instacart, The 6 year old grocery delivery startup which counts as one of the main leaders in its market has seen remarkable success since its start having grown to over 500,000 users in total (as at last year).

The company has raised about $1 billion in total and was valued at $4.35 billion from its most recent funding round.

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