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DoorDash is buying rival Instacart in a deal worth about $17 billion, signaling that the delivery wars continue to heat up.
The deal, announced Thursday, marks the end of Instacart as an independent company. Instacart went public in 2023 and benefited from a pandemic-era boom in grocery delivery service, but it has struggled to maintain momentum against larger competitors, like Uber, Amazon and Walmart.
Combining Instacart and DoorDash would create a larger company that would better compete with these rivals. Amazon, for example, continues to expand its same-day grocery service, which now has 2,300 locations, while Walmart now offers 30-minute delivery in select locations. Meanwhile, Uber has expanded its offerings and recently signed a deal with Costco.
DoorDash said in a press release that the combined company “will offer grocers and retailers of all sizes DoorDash’s delivery network and Instacart’s grocery and fulfillment technology.”
DoorDash has expanded its range of services beyond food delivery, including adding restaurant reservations and delivery products beyond food, entering into partnerships with Home Depot and Sephora. Now she can also grow her business by offering more grocery options.
“Grocery shopping is one of the hardest things to get online. Someone has to pick out a ripe avocado, find a substitute that you would choose yourself, and bring you the ice cream before it melts,” Tony Xu, co-founder and CEO of DoorDash, said in a statement.
He added that Instacart “has spent years learning how to do this well for grocers, while DoorDash has built a delivery network and technology that local stores rely on every day. Together, we could provide stores of all sizes with more of these tools and unlock the potential of grocery delivery.”
The deal is a mix of cash and stock, with DoorDash paying $65 per share, representing a roughly 25% premium to Instacart’s Oct. 22 close, when media reports said it was exploring a sale.
The companies tout the benefits of this combination, including that people won’t have to purchase two membership programs (DashPass and Instacart+), which could save their customers “around $100 million a year in membership fees alone.”
But there is already opposition to the deal, with the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP), an anti-monopoly advocacy group, pushing regulators to block the deal because it would control nearly 60% of the third-party grocery delivery market.
“Instacart and Doordash have spent the better part of a decade bullying mainstream companies and denying fair wages and benefits to their combined 9 million workers,” Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel for AELP, said in a statement. “This merger represents the next frontier of data-driven abuse, exploiting enormous power asymmetries to reduce workers’ compensation on the way in and empty consumers’ wallets on the way out.”
The tie-up, which is expected to be finalized in the coming months, is one of several projects in the delivery space. Grubhub’s U.S. operations were sold to Wonder for $650 million in 2025, and Uber bought European company Delivery Hero this summer for $14.8 billion. In 2020, Uber purchased Postmates for $2.65 billion.
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