Barely two weeks ago, on-demand grocer Instacart announced a $265 million funding round that valued it at $39 billion, with the round coming ahead of an expected IPO for the company. 

Now, Instacart has further hinted at IPO plans by naming a new board member who’s well-versed in seeing tech companies through IPOs and is currently the CEO of one of the hottest public software companies, Snowflake Computing.

• Instacart has announced that it’s appointed Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman to its board. He’ll join six other members on the board, including Instacart’s Founder and CEO Apoorva Mehta and representatives from investment firms Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and D1 Capital Partners.

Frank Slootman.

• Slootman is a tech veteran who has seen three big tech companies through IPOs as a CEO, first at Data Domain Inc, then ServiceNow, and currently at Snowflake. It’s likely that Instacart has added him to his board thanks to his experience of seeing tech companies through public listings as itself is set to do so.

• It’s such that two of the companies taken public by Slootman, ServiceNow and Snowflake, currently have a collective market value of over $160 billion. The third, Data Domain, was taken private by EMC, now Dell EMC, in a $2.4 billion deal in 2009.

• Instacart is one of the hottest high-growth tech companies out there, growing from scratch to a $39 billion valuation and a big business to back it up in just nine years of existence. It’s made its mark as the biggest on-demand grocery service in North America, present in regions that sum up to 85% of U.S. households and 70% of Canadian households.

• The Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 brought about a big surge in the need for on-demand grocery deliveries and Instacart widely benefitted from it. Building on that momentum, the company raised nearly $1 billion over the past year as it sought to expand rapidly, and has said that’ll increase its corporate headcount by 50% this year.

• With a successful business, big funding, and high investor attention, Instacart seems ideal for a soon public listing and has already drawn attention towards that. Rumors have abounded that the company is looking to go public soon, backed up by hints from it in that regard, such as when it hired a new CFO from banking firm Goldman Sachs late last year who has a versed resume in working on IPOs for tech companies.

• Now, Instacart has hinted at that further with the addition of Slootman to its board. “I look forward to joining the Board and supporting the Instacart team as they enter the next chapter of growth,” he said in a statement.

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