Sources: Instacart decided to delay its highly anticipated IPO to 2023 as the current stock market is too volatile; the company filed for an IPO earlier in 2022
Dan Primack / Axios :
Context & Ripple Effects
Instacart's IPO clock has been slipping for a year: it first pushed its debut out of Q4 2021 while refocusing on retailer services beyond delivery, then confidentially filed in May 2022 with timing explicitly left open. The intervening months were rough — a 40% valuation cut to $24B in March and a hiring slowdown after adding 1,500-plus staff in 2021.
First-order effects
- Instacart's employees and early backers wait another year for liquidity, while the company keeps operating under private-market scrutiny at its marked-down $24B valuation instead of testing public demand.
Second-order effects
- The delay keeps pressure on the broader class of confidential filers from the same 2022 cohort, whose own windows stay shut until a marquee name like Instacart proves the consumer-tech listing can price.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, IPO readiness becomes decoupled from filing: companies file confidentially early, then hold until volatility clears — which is what happened when Instacart finally filed publicly in August 2023 with revenue up 39% to $2.55B and a swing to $428M net income.
The trend: Late-stage tech companies are treating confidential filings as standing options, timing their actual listings to market windows rather than filing dates.