DoorDash announced Thursday that it intends to purchase grocery delivery competitor Instacart in a transaction worth roughly $17 billion, a deal that would consolidate two of the most widely used delivery platforms available to Colorado Springs consumers. The agreement would bring Instacart's run as a standalone company to a close.
Instacart entered public markets in 2023 and capitalized on surging pandemic-era demand for grocery delivery, but it has struggled to hold its ground against larger and better-resourced competitors including Uber, Amazon, and Walmart. Amazon has continued expanding its same-day grocery operation across 2,300 locations, Walmart has rolled out 30-minute delivery in certain markets, and Uber recently locked in a partnership agreement with Costco.
DoorDash stated in a press release that the resulting company "will offer grocers and retailers of every size DoorDash's delivery network and Instacart's grocery and fulfillment technology." DoorDash had already been pushing well beyond its restaurant delivery origins, branching into reservations and non-food retail through partnerships with companies including Home Depot and Sephora. Adding Instacart's grocery infrastructure would extend that expansion into everyday household shopping.
The transaction is structured as part cash and part stock, with DoorDash offering $65 a share — a premium of roughly 25% above Instacart's closing price on October 22, the date on which reports first emerged that the company was weighing a sale. The companies pointed to membership consolidation as a consumer benefit, projecting that folding DashPass and Instacart+ into a single program could save customers an "estimated $100 million per year on membership fees alone."
DoorDash co-founder and CEO Tony Xu framed the deal around the particular difficulty of executing grocery delivery reliably. He described grocery as "one of the hardest things to get right online," citing the need to select ripe produce, identify acceptable substitutions, and deliver frozen goods before they spoil. He said Instacart "has spent years learning to do that well for grocers, while DoorDash has built a delivery network and technology that local stores rely on every day," and that together the companies could "unlock the potential of grocery delivery."
The deal has already drawn opposition from the American Economic Liberties Project, an anti-monopoly advocacy group, which is urging regulators to block the combination on the grounds that it would hand the merged company control over nearly three-fifths of the third-party grocery delivery market. The group's senior legal counsel said in a statement that the two companies had spent years "bullying main street businesses and denying fair pay and benefits to their combined 9 million workers," and called the merger "the next frontier of data-driven abuse, exploiting massive asymmetries of power to squeeze worker compensation on the way in and drain consumer wallets on the way out."
The merger, which the companies expect to close within months, fits into a broader pattern of consolidation across the delivery sector, which has also seen Grubhub's U.S. operations sold to Wonder for $650 million in 2025, Uber's $14.8 billion purchase of European firm Delivery Hero, and Uber's $2.65 billion acquisition of Postmates back in 2020.
Regulatory review of the proposed merger is pending, and no formal timeline for a decision has been made public.