Prior to its early IPO for 2021, Instacart said on Thursday that it had appointed Goldman Sachs’ top Internet bank 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 CFO for the past five years.
Instacart became one of the most valuable private companies in the United States last year. A round of fundraising in 2020 more than doubled its valuation since the beginning of the year to $ 17.7 billion. It is now one of the most anticipated initial public offerings of 2021, after high-profile tech unicorn IPOs for Airbnb and DoorDash in 2020. Goldman Sachs is reported to lead the IPO and can evaluate the grocery delivery app at around $ 30 billion.
Giovanni served as a principal consultant in some of the most important technology businesses in recent years, including IPOs for Airbnb and Doordash, direct list of Slack and SPAC of Dragoneer.
Giovanni has been a consultant at Instacart since 2015 in his role at Goldman, leading several rounds of financing and important transactions.
He is the latest Goldman Sachs executive to leave the bank for a senior position with a client. Anthony Noto was co-director of investment bank TMT at Goldman before joining Twitter as CFO in 2014. Twitter promoted Noto to COO and hired his former Goldman colleague Ned Segal as new CFO in 2017. Noto left Twitter at the beginning of 2018 to become CEO of SoFi, of fintech’s start-up.
Other technology companies have chosen Wall Street veterans as CFOs. Alphabet hired Ruth Porat in 2015, a former CFO at Morgan Stanley. Jack Dorsey chose Sarah Friar, managing director at Goldman Sachs, to CFO at Square before she left to become CEO of social media startup Nextdoor. And before his recent IPO, Doordash hired Prabir Adarkar as CFO, a former vice president of Goldman’s investment banking group TMT.
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 that he is excited to welcome Giovanni to the team.
“The size and scale we achieve requires that we have an excellent group of people around the table,” he said.
Instacart noted an increase in demand for food delivery amid the coronavirus pandemic. “We saw five years of growth in five weeks,” added Mehta. “Our business is still growing with the volume of transactions growing 300% year on year in December.”
Instacart has been building a deep bank in recent years, largely focused on expanding the company to companies and advertising.
Instacart’s chief revenue officer, Seth Dallaire, joined Amazon in 2019, where he led the global ad sales business. Similarly, Instacart’s technical director, Mark Schaaf, led the engineering of mobile image ads at Google and was CTO at Thumbtack before joining the company.
Mehta said the hiring wave will continue in 2021 as they hope to increase the number of employees by 50% across the company in the next six months.