Ahead of its IPO scheduled for 2021, Instacart said on 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 telecommunications group, will join Instacart on January 27, succeeding 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 over the past year. A fundraising round in 2020 doubled its valuation from the beginning of the year to $ 17.7 billion. It is now one of the most anticipated initial public offerings of 2021, following high-tech IPOs for Airbnb and DoorDash in 2020. It was reported that Goldman Sachs would lead the IPO and could value the grocery delivery app to about $ 30 billion.
Giovanni acted as lead advisor on some of the hottest tech deals in recent years, including IPOs for Airbnb and Doordash, Slone’s direct listing and Dragoneer’s SPAC.
Giovanni has been an advisor to Instacart 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 to hold a senior position in a client. Anthony Noto was TMT’s co-director of investment banking at Goldman before joining Twitter as chief financial officer in 2014. Twitter promoted Noto to COO and hired his former Goldman colleague, Ned Segal, as new chief financial officer in 2017. Noto left Twitter in early 2018 to become CEO. from the fintech startup SoFi.
Other tech companies have approved Wall Street veterans as financial executives. Alphabet hired Ruth Porat in 2015, former chief financial officer of Morgan Stanley. Jack Dorsey approved Sarah Friar, CEO of Goldman Sachs, for CFO in Square before leaving to become CEO of startup social networking 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-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 we are achieving requires that we have an excellent group of people around the table,” he said.
Instacart has seen demand for grocery supply grow amid the coronavirus pandemic. “We saw five years of growth in five weeks,” Mehta added. “Our business continues to grow, with a transaction volume of over 300% year-on-year in December.”
Instacart has been building a deep bank over the past few years, primarily focused on expanding the business toward business and advertising.
Instacart revenue manager Seth Dallaire joined in 2019 from Amazon, where he led the global ad sales business. Similarly, Mark Schaaf, technical director of Instacart, led mobile display ad engineering at Google and was CTO at Thumbtack before joining the company.
Mehta said the hiring period will continue until 2021 as they expect to increase the number of workers by 50% across the company over the next six months.