DoorDash is in advanced talks to buy Instacart for about $17 billion, and a deal could be finalized as soon as Wednesday. If it closes, the company that brings you dinner will also own the company that brings you groceries — the two biggest names in American delivery under one roof.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the talks on Monday, and Reuters confirmed that a deal could come together this week, though nothing is certain. PYMNTS reports the price would value Instacart at roughly $17 billion — a premium over its roughly $13 billion market value at Friday's close. Instacart shares jumped about 8% on the news; DoorDash fell around 6%.
The talks have a history. The Information reported Friday that Instacart, which hired an investment bank to review its options, had held preliminary discussions with both DoorDash and Uber. Monday's reports say the Uber talks are now dead — and the two companies have reportedly explored a DoorDash deal before, only for it to fall apart.
The timing is worth noting. On the same day the deal reports landed, Instacart announced it is winding down Caper Cart, its AI-powered smart shopping cart business, after retail adoption failed to scale quickly enough. The company says it will keep building in-store tools, but focused on "intelligence and software" rather than hardware. Bloomberg reported the Caper decision was made over a period of months and predated the sale talks — but either way, Instacart is arriving at the negotiating table as a software company, not a hardware one.
That is the real prize here, and the real question. DoorDash started with restaurant food and has pushed steadily into retail — Macy's, CVS, Target — while Instacart brings the grocery relationships and the fulfillment infrastructure DoorDash has been building from scratch. Combined, they'd be the default delivery layer for nearly everything a household buys.
The catch is the one hanging over every deal of this size in 2026: regulators. A combination of the largest restaurant-delivery platform and the largest grocery-delivery platform would invite a hard look from antitrust enforcers, and the premium suggests DoorDash is betting it can survive that look. Watch whether a deal is actually announced by Wednesday — and if it is, watch how fast Washington responds.
— via PYMNTS