Apoorva Mehta

Identity and role

Apoorva Mehta founded Instacart, legally Maplebear Inc., in 2012 with Brandon Leonardo and Maxwell Mullen. He was chief executive until August 2021, when Fidji Simo, a former Meta Platforms executive, took over and he became executive chairman. He gave up that seat as part of the September 2023 initial public offering, ending an 11-year tenure. He now runs Cloud Health Systems.

Biography / career arc

Mehta was born in India, grew up partly in Libya, and lived in a small town outside Toronto, where, Bloomberg reported, waiting at a bus stop in the cold with bags of groceries gave him the idea for Instacart. He studied engineering at the University of Waterloo and spent two years on supply-chain logistics at Amazon. He went through 20 startup ideas, from enterprise software to advertising, before the personal-shopper model. Y Combinator admitted Instacart after he had missed the application deadline by two months and delivered a six-pack of beer to one of its partners. Over the next decade he raised more than $2.8 billion, according to PitchBook data cited by Bloomberg, from investors including Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.

Pandemic-relief / PPP-EIDL role

Bloomberg counted the pandemic as one of two turning points for Instacart. Its sales rose 107 percent from a year earlier in the week of March 10 to 16, 2020, CNBC reported, and orders grew to 262.6 million in 2022 from 171.5 million in 2020. To handle the demand Instacart said it would add 300,000 shoppers over three months, as independent contractors without employee benefits.

The shoppers were not satisfied. The Gig Workers Collective called a nationwide walkout for Monday, March 30, 2020, asking for hazard pay of $5 an order, protective equipment such as disinfectant wipes, and sick pay that covered shoppers with preexisting conditions. Instacart had offered up to 14 days of paid sick leave to shoppers diagnosed with the coronavirus or placed under quarantine. On March 27 it announced bonus pay for in-store shoppers and an extended pay policy for quarantined workers. The same day President Trump signed the CARES Act, which let gig workers, including Uber and Lyft drivers, apply for unemployment benefits and added up to $600 a week.

Instacart's business depended on keeping shoppers as contractors. It was one of the gig companies that, The Intercept reported, spent more than $200 million on California's Proposition 22 in 2020, the ballot measure that exempted ride-hailing and food-delivery apps from the state's employee test. Ballotpedia's donor table lists Instacart, under its corporate name Maplebear Inc., at $31.6 million. After the November 2020 election it joined Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and Postmates in forming the App-Based Work Alliance in Washington to argue against reclassification at the federal level.

Their own relief

No PPP or EIDL loan to Mehta personally appears in the records cited here. SBA's PPP data do list seven loans, totaling $86,837, to borrowers named "Maplebear Inc.", "Instacart", "Instacart FC Fund LLC" or "Instacart FL Fund LLC" in San Francisco's 94105 ZIP code, most of them at 50 Beale Street, approved between May 2020 and April 2021. Each reported one job and an independent-contractor business type. Five were forgiven and two were charged off. The data do not say who the borrowers were.

Legal status / controversies

Mehta has not been charged with a crime, and no enforcement action names him in the documents cited here. The pandemic disputes over Instacart were about shopper pay, safety and classification.

Where they are now (2025–2026)

Instacart priced its IPO at $30 a share on September 18, 2023, a $9.9 billion valuation, a quarter of the $39 billion it reached in its spring 2021 funding round. Bloomberg reported that board members had begun to lose confidence in Mehta's leadership around that peak. He sold $21 million of stock in the offering and remained the largest individual shareholder with about 10 percent. Bloomberg's story put his fortune at $1.3 billion in its headline and $1.1 billion in its first sentence; the version Fortune published said $1.3 billion, including his stake in Cloud Health Systems. Mehta is chief executive of that company, which had raised $42 million from investors including Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst and was valued at $200 million in November 2022. Its first brand, Sunrise, sells online weight-loss programs, including medications such as Wegovy and Ozempic.

Sources held in this archive

PUA Was Built to Be Uncheckable
The $400 Billion UI Number
Pandemic Unemployment Fraud: What the Final Numbers Actually Say