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Ahead of its scheduled IPO in 2021, Instacart announced Thursday that it has appointed Goldman Sachs’ top internet banker as its next chief financial officer.
Nick Giovanni, currently the head of Goldman Sachs’ technology, media and telecommunications group, will join Instacart on January 27, succeeding Sagar Sanghvi, who has been the startup’s chief financial officer for five years.
Instacart has grown into one of the most valuable private companies in the United States over the past year. Fundraising in 2020 has more than doubled its valuation since the start of the year to $ 17.7 billion. It is now one of the most anticipated initial public offerings of 2021, following high-profile tech unicorn IPOs for Airbnb and DoorDash in 2020. Goldman Sachs is said to be leading the IPO and may value the IPO. grocery delivery app at around $ 30 billion.
Giovanni has been a senior advisor on some of the hottest tech deals in recent years, including IPOs for Airbnb and Doordash, Slack’s direct listing, and Dragoneer’s SPAC.
Giovanni has been an advisor to Instacart since 2015 in his role at Goldman, leading several key funding rounds and transactions.
He is the last Goldman Sachs executive to leave the bank to take a leadership role with a client. Anthony Noto was Co-Director of TMT Investment Bank at Goldman before joining Twitter as CFO in 2014. Twitter promoted Noto to COO and hired former Goldman colleague Ned Segal as new CFO in 2017. Noto left Twitter in early 2018 to become CEO of fintech start-up SoFi.
Other tech companies have brought in Wall Street veterans as CFOs. Alphabet hired Ruth Porat in 2015, former CFO of Morgan Stanley. Jack Dorsey hired Sarah Friar, Managing Director of Goldman Sachs, for the CFO position of Square before leaving to become CEO of social media startup Nextdoor. And ahead of its recent IPO, Doordash hired Prabir Adarkar as CFO, former vice president of Goldman’s TMT investment banking group.
Goldman Sachs partners Sam Britton and Matt Gibson will succeed Giovanni as co-directors of the bank’s global TMT group.
In an interview with CNBC, Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta said he was delighted to welcome Giovanni to the team.
“The size and scale that we are reaching requires that we have a great group of people around the table,” he said.
Instacart has seen demand for grocery deliveries increase amid the coronavirus pandemic. “We have seen five years of growth in five weeks,” Mehta added. “Our business continues to grow with transaction volume up 300% year over year in December.”
Instacart has built a solid experience over the past few years, mainly focused on business expansion in business and advertising.
Instacart Revenue Director Seth Dallaire joined Amazon in 2019, where he led the global advertising sales business. Likewise, Instacart CTO, Mark Schaaf, led the engineering of mobile display ads at Google and was CTO at Thumbtack before joining the company.
Mehta said the hiring frenzy will continue into 2021, as they plan to increase the number of employees at the company by 50% over the next six months.
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