Ahead of the expected 2021 IPO, Instacart said Thursday it had appointed Goldman Sachs’ chief internet banker as its next CFO.
Nick Giovanni, Head of Technology, Media and Communications at Goldman Sachs, will join Instacart on January 27, succeeding Sagar Sanghee, who has been the startup’s chief financial officer for the past five years.
Instacart has become one of the most valuable private companies in the United States over the past year. And a fundraising round in 2020 has more than doubled its value since the start of the year, to $ 17.7 billion. It’s now one of the most anticipated initial public offerings of 2021, after unicorn tech’s high-profile IPOs for Airbnb and DoorDash in 2020. Goldman Sachs is mentioned To lead the IPO and could estimate the value of a grocery delivery app around $ 30 billion.
Giovanni has served as a lead advisor on some of the most important tech deals over the past few years including Airbnb and Doordash IPOs, Slack Live List and Dragoneer’s SPAC.
Giovanni has worked as a consultant for Instacart since 2015 in his role at Goldman, leading many rounds of financing and major transactions.
He is the latest Goldman Sachs executive to leave the bank for a senior position in a client. Anthony Noto was co-chair of TMT Investment Banking Services at Goldman before joining Twitter as CFO in 2014. Twitter promoted Noto to COO and named his former Goldman co-worker Ned Segal as their new CFO in 2017. Noto left Twitter in early year. 2018 to become CEO of SoFi startup fintech.
Other tech companies have appointed Wall Street veterans as CFO. Alphabet hired Ruth Porat in 2015, and she’s a former finance director at Morgan Stanley. Jack Dorsey appointed Goldman Sachs managing director Sarah Friar as CFO on Square before she left to become the CEO of the social media startup Nextdoor. Prior to the IPO, Dordash Prabber appointed Adarkar as CFO and former vice president of Goldman’s TMT Investment Banking Group.
Goldman Sachs partners Sam Britton and Matt Gibson He will succeed Giovanni as Co-President of the Bank’s TMT Global Group.
In an interview with CNBC, Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta said he is excited to welcome Giovanni to the team.
« The size and scale that we reach requires us to have an excellent group of people around the table, » he said.
Instacart has seen a surge in demand for grocery delivery amidst Coronavirus pandemic. « We have seen five years of growth in five weeks, » added Mehta. « Our business continues to grow with transaction volume increasing 300% year on year in December. »
Instacart has built a deep seat over the past few years, and has focused heavily on the company’s expansion into projects and advertising.
Seth Dallaire, Instacart’s chief revenue officer, joined in 2019 from Amazon, leading the global ad sales business. Likewise, Instacart’s chief technology officer, Marc Schaff, led the engineering of Google’s mobile display ads and was a director of technology at Thumbtack prior to joining the company.
Mehta said the hiring spree will continue into 2021, as they expect the number of employees to increase by 50% across the company over the next six months.
