Apoorva Mehta

Instacart’s 33 year old founder and CEO is now a billionaire. Apoorva Mehta, who started the grocery delivery firm in 2012, has seen demand for his company’s services skyrocket in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. The firm has hired 300,000 new shoppers since March 2020 and announced plans in April 2020 to hire 250,000 more to get back to offering one-hour and same-day deliveries. Born in India and raised in Canada, Mehta studied engineering at the University of Waterloo and worked as a design engineer at Blackberry and Qualcomm. He then landed at Amazon, where he helped develop the ecommerce giant’s fulfillment system as a supply chain engineer. But after a couple years, Mehta was looking for a new challenge. In 2010 he quit his job, moved from Seattle to San Francisco, and started trying his hand at entrepreneurship. Altogether, including the latest round, Instacart has raised nearly $2.2 billion in funding from dozens of investors including venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins.