Ahead of the anticipated IPO for 2021, Instacart said on Thursday that it had named Goldman Sachs’ chief internet banker as its next chief financial officer.
Nick Giovanni, currently head of Goldman Sachs’ technology, media and telecommunications group, will join Instacart on January 27, replacing Sagar Sanghvi, who has been the start-up’s chief financial officer for the past five years.
Instacart has become one of the most valuable private companies in the United States in the last year. A fundraising round in 2020 has doubled its valuation since the beginning of the year to $ 17.7 billion. It is now one of the most anticipated initial public offerings of 2021, following the high-tech IPOs for Airbnb and DoorDash in 2020. Goldman Sachs would be the leader of the IPO and could appreciate the food delivery application at approximately $ 30 billion. USD.
Giovanni has served as senior advisor to 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 Instacart advisor since 2015 in his role at Goldman, leading several rounds of financing and key transactions.
He is the latest Goldman Sachs executive to leave the bank for a management position at a client. Anthony Noto was co-head of TMT investment bank at Goldman before joining Twitter as CFO in 2014. Twitter promoted Noto to the COO and hired former Goldman colleague Ned Segal as the new CFO in 2017. Noto left Twitter in early 2018 to become CEO of fintech startup SoFi.
Other technology companies have named Wall Street veterans as CFOs. Alphabet hired Ruth Porat in 2015, former chief financial officer of Morgan Stanley. Jack Dorsey turned to Sarah Friar, CEO of Goldman Sachs, for CFO at Square, before leaving to become CEO of the social networking startup Nextdoor. And before his recent IPO, Doordash hired Prabir Adarkar as chief financial officer, former vice president of Goldman’s TMT investment banking group.
Goldman Sachs partners Sam Britton and Matt Gibson will succeed Giovanni as co-heads of the bank’s global TMT group.
In an interview with CNBC, the CEO of Instacart, Apoorva Mehta, said that he is delighted to welcome Giovanni to the team.
“The size and scale we reach requires us to have an excellent group of people around the table,” he said.
Instacart has seen demand for food delivery grow amid the coronavirus pandemic. “We have seen five years of growth in five weeks,” Mehta added. “Our business is constantly growing, with the volume of transactions growing by 300% year-on-year in December.”
Instacart has built a deep bank in recent years, largely focused on the company’s expansion in business and advertising.
Seth Dallaire, Instacart’s revenue manager, joined Amazon in 2019, where he led the global ad sales business. Mark Schaaf, Instacart’s technical director, also led mobile image engineering at Google and was CTO at Thumbtack before joining the company.
Mehta said hiring efforts will continue until 2021 as he expects to increase the number of employees by 50% across the company in the next six months.