Text size
Instacart so far hasn’t announced any plans to go public.
Tiffany Hagler-Geard/Bloomberg
Instacart has hired
Goldman Sachs
tech investment banking head Nick Giovanni as its chief financial officer, a huge clue that the online grocery-delivery firm is getting closer to going public.
Giovanni will report to founder and CEO Apoorva Mehta and will succeed Sagar Sanghvi, who is leaving the company but will stay for a brief period to help with the transition. The move is effective Jan. 27.
Giovanni has been with Goldman for his entire 23-year career, since completing his undergraduate degree in business from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1998, according to his LinkedIn page.
Instacart so far hasn’t announced any plans to go public, and it declined to comment on speculation that it might be planning to do so. But hiring one of the industry’s leading financiers as your CFO seems a like a big hint.
“Nick’s finance experience, operational discipline, and deep understanding of complex marketplaces like ours will be instrumental to Instacart,” Mehta said in a statement. “[H]e’s played a pivotal role advising some of the world’s most prolific companies, founders and management teams as they’ve scaled from being private companies to global leaders. For years, Nick has served as a trusted advisor to Instacart, supporting our business as we’ve grown to become the North American leader in online grocery. We’re excited to now welcome him as our new CFO.”
In its news release, Instacart points out that Giovanni has advised hundreds of clients on initial public offerings and other transactions. The release singles out that he worked on the direct listings for both
Spotify Technology
(SPOT) and
Slack Technologies
(WORK)—which might signal a direct listing could be a possible exit strategy for Instacart.
He’s also worked on many high profile tech acquisitions, including Slack’s pending sale to
Salesforce.com
(CRM), Credit Karma’s sale to
Intuit
(INTU), Skype’s sale to
Microsoft
(MSFT), and
Zillow Group’s
(Z) purchase of Trulia.
Instacart has raised $2.4 billion in venture capital, according to Crunchbase, and has been valued for as much as $17.7 billion, according to CB Insights.
Write to Eric J. Savitz at eric.savitz@barrons.com