DoorDash to Buy Instacart for $17 Billion as FTC Opens Pricing Probe Into Both
The $65-a-share deal would combine the nation's leading food-delivery app with a top grocery platform. The Federal Trade Commission announced the same day that it is examining how both companies set prices.
DoorDash said Thursday that it will buy Instacart for $17 billion, joining one of the nation's top grocery delivery services with its biggest food-delivery rival. DoorDash will pay $65 per share.
The company says the deal will let more supermarkets use Instacart's platform to run their own websites. "Instacart has spent years learning to do that well for grocers, while DoorDash has built a delivery network and technology that local stores rely on every day," DoorDash co-founder and CEO Tony Xu said in a statement. "Together, we could give stores of every size more of those tools and unlock the potential of grocery delivery."
For shoppers, DoorDash promised more choice and faster delivery. Instacart customers could shop at more than 50,000 additional stores, on top of the nearly 100,000 stores already on the Instacart platform, the company said. After the deal closes, DoorDash plans to keep Instacart's brand, technology and app.
The two companies will operate separately until the merger is finalized, which is expected in late 2027 or early 2028. That is a long runway, and it reflects how much regulatory scrutiny is likely.
The timing of that scrutiny is hard to miss. The Federal Trade Commission said Thursday it has opened a probe into DoorDash and Instacart, along with seven other companies across retail and transportation, to examine how they set prices. The focus is a practice known as personalized pricing, where AI and consumer data are used to charge different shoppers different prices for the same item.
Groundwork Collaborative, an advocacy group, has called the practice unfair and predatory. In a months-long investigation last year, it found that identical grocery items on Instacart could differ in price by as much as 23% from one customer to the next.
The deal also reshapes a competitive map. DoorDash held nearly 61% of the food delivery market at the end of 2024, ahead of Uber Eats at around 26% and Grubhub at around 6%, according to Consumer Edge. Instacart has been losing ground, now commanding 18% of spending on U.S. delivery platforms, down from 26% five years ago, the research firm said.
DoorDash reported earnings a day earlier showing revenue up 34% from a year ago and total orders up 28%. The San Francisco company, valued at about $73 billion, started in restaurant delivery in 2013 and moved into grocery in 2020 during the pandemic surge in demand. It later teamed with Kroger in 2022 and with Costco last month.
The acquisition makes DoorDash a more potent rival to Amazon and Walmart in groceries, at a time when nearly 150 million Americans shopped for groceries online as of 2025, according to Capital One. It is also the latest sign of consolidation in an industry increasingly dominated by a few large players. Whether regulators see a bigger grocery competitor or a bigger pricing-power problem will decide how smoothly the deal moves from here.
