Food delivery company Instacart has pulled back on plans to go public in 2022, according to three people familiar with the situation, in the latest sign of public market turmoil.
The company was one of the few tech companies looking to go public this year. Wall Street, horrified by rising inflation, war in Ukraine and fears of a recession, prefers to put its money into safer bets.
Instacart filed the papers for so-called classified filings earlier this year. This meant that the company did not yet have to disclose certain data about its business. This application did not require Instacart to complete the public offering, but it was seen as a major step towards the public offering.
But the window for this year’s public offering is quickly closing. The company was running out of time because the bank didn’t want the company to go public during the holidays.
The three people who spoke out about Instacart’s IPO moratorium declined to identify themselves because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Founded in 2012, Instacart combines people who order groceries from their app at home with shoppers who work as independent contractors for the company. Contractors pick and deliver someone’s groceries.
Instacart’s revenue surged early in the pandemic as Covid-19 cases increased and people preferred not to go to stores for safety reasons. That acceleration slowed as more people got vaccinated and returned to normal shopping habits.
In March, the company cut its internal valuation from $40 billion to $24 billion. “While we are confident in the strength of our business, we are not immune to the market turmoil that has affected both public and private companies,” he said at the time.
The public offering year got off to a shaky start. The pace of his IPO in the first half of this year was his slowest since 2009, according to Dealogic data. Such product shortages are also impacting the earnings of some of Wall Street’s largest banks.
Erin Griffith When Kellen Browning contributed to the report.