Ahead of the expected IPO in 2021, Instacart said Thursday that it has appointed Goldman Sachs’ chief internet banker as its next chief financial officer.
Nick Giovanni, currently head of Goldman Sachs’ technology, media and telecom group, will join Instacart on January 27 to succeed Sagar Sanghvi, who was the start-up’s CFO for the past five years.
Instacart has become one of the most valuable private companies in the US in the past year. A fundraising round in 2020 more than doubled the valuation from the start of the year to $ 17.7 billion. It is now one of the most anticipated IPOs of 2021, following high-profile tech unicorn IPOs for Airbnb and DoorDash in 2020. Goldman Sachs would lead the IPO and could value the grocery delivery app at around $ 30 billion.
Giovanni has served as lead 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 adviser to Instacart in his role at Goldman since 2015, where he led several rounds of funding and significant transactions.
He is the last Goldman Sachs manager to leave the bank for a senior position with a client. Anthony Noto was co-head of TMT investment banking at Goldman before joining Twitter as CFO in 2014. Twitter promoted Noto to COO and hired his former Goldman colleague Ned Segal as the new CFO in 2017. Noto left Twitter in early 2018 to become CEO. from fintech start-up SoFi.
Other tech companies have recruited Wall Street veterans as CFOs. Alphabet hired Ruth Porat, a former CFO of Morgan Stanley, in 2015. Jack Dorsey tapped Sarah Friar, a Goldman Sachs executive, for CFO at Square before leaving to become CEO of Nextdoor, a social media startup. And prior to the recent IPO, Doordash Prabir hired Adarkar as CFO, a 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, Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta said he is delighted to welcome Giovanni to the team.
“The size and scale that we achieve requires that we have an excellent group of people around the table,” he said.
Instacart has seen the demand for grocery delivery increase during the coronavirus pandemic. “We saw five years of growth in five weeks,” added Mehta. “Our business is still growing with a transaction volume of 300% year over year in December.”
Instacart has built a deep bank in recent years, largely focused on expanding the business into enterprise and advertising.
Instacart’s Chief Revenue Officer, Seth Dallaire, joined from Amazon in 2019, where he led global ad sales. Mark Schaaf, Instacart’s Chief Technical Officer, led mobile display advertising engineering at Google and was CTO at Thumbtack before joining the company.
Mehta said the workforce will continue into 2021 as they expect the workforce across the company to grow 50% over the next six months.