Maplebear Inc. ($CART)

Well, thank you very much, everybody, for joining us this morning. We're really honored to have with us from Instacart, Emily Reuter, Chief Financial Officer; Rebecca Yoshiyama from Investor Relations; and Alfonso from Investor Relations joining us as well. So we do have the dream team. And I'm Colin Sebastian. I cover Internet and Internet services at Baird. Our conference has had a lot around AI, AI enablement. We'll talk about that in a minute. But first, just to go through the disclosure. Some of the statements made today by Instacart may be considered forward-looking. These statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Any forward-looking statements made today by the company are based on assumptions as of today, and Instacart undertakes no obligation to update them. Please refer to Instacart's most recent Form 10-Q for a discussion of the risk factors that may impact actual results. Emily may also reference certain non-GAAP financial metrics and reconciliations are available on CART's Investor Relations website, and we'll start going through those reconciliations now.

But before we do that, let's talk about -- I think the last quarter, that would mark 9 consecutive quarters of double-digit volume growth. Q2 implies another quarter, 11% to 13% GTV growth, which is above order growth. And looking out the next couple of years, I think it might be useful to talk about what you believe are the most important drivers to sustain that growth across the business.

Yes, sure. I mean, first and foremost, obviously, we're quite pleased with the 9 quarters of double-digit growth. That's a combination of things. I think, strong execution across the team, which is, of course, an important piece of the puzzle. But the other piece of it is just the model that we've built, which is a number of reinforcing factors that allow us to keep compounding over time. It starts with the marketplace. That is an area where we continue to add new users. We continue to deepen engagement with those users. We continue to grow our Instacart Plus membership, and we're sort of accelerating the overall product capabilities and features with AI that allow us to continue to grow. We then continue to take that technology and provide it for our retailer partners in the form of our enterprise business. And that has been something that is a really unique asset that we have that others don't really have access to that allows us to tap into an entirely different body of consumers that we might not otherwise be able to touch and retailers are really motivated to grow that part of the business. And so those 2 pieces really reinforce each other in terms of the technology and the capabilities that we bring to the table, but also in terms of the pools of consumers that we're able to access. And that's really the foundation on which we then build other capabilities and services. So you see us talking about expanding enterprise not just in North America, but internationally. You talk about AI solutions as a new vector for growth in-store as sort of rounding out our omnichannel experience. So we're just seeing a lot of really good momentum across the business and are expecting to sort of continue to see that growth into the future.

Yes. We'll unpack a number of those areas more specifically. For those of you in the room, feel free to send a question to the e-mail address there. And if there's time at the end, we can get to those as well. You've said growth shifts back to users as the company laps the benefit from the $10 basket, minimum basket size and the restaurant partnerships. I guess what gives you the confidence that user growth can be the primary -- can be a primary growth driver? And how is customer acquisition costs trending as you ramp towards the full funnel marketing program?

Yes. Look, I think it's interesting. We get a lot of questions around this. When I go back in time, user growth was a primary driver of growth. When I think about it, I think about it more as 2025 being somewhat of an anomaly where we layered in a combination of restaurants in '24, but also the $10 minimum basket feature for our Instacart Plus users, which as we talked about at the time, was really a lower AOV, but higher frequency way to drive engagement with users. And so that -- in '25 drove order frequency being a more significant component of driving orders growth for that period of time. But it was always our expectation and has been a part of our execution and our strategy to drive orders growth. So that's not new. It's just if you think about the impact of '25, some of that additional order frequency. Now order frequency as a driver, we expect to remain. But again, order of magnitude, that subsides as we lap that feature. Now from a customer acquisition standpoint, we're very pleased with our ability to continue to drive efficiencies across our marketing portfolio. The way I think about marketing isn't just purely about CAC, though. It's really about I have a marketing budget. We have a full funnel approach to marketing that starts at the top with brand awareness, and you see some of that and then very quickly move down the funnel from new user acquisition, which is, of course, a big component of what we do. But we also spend a lot of time reengaging users that have lapsed or driving engagement with existing users. So it's part of our portfolio. And really, what we do is very frequently, monthly, bimonthly -- sorry, weekly even, we're looking at that portfolio, assessing ROI and shifting dollars between different areas of the portfolio, depending on what we're seeing in terms of those returns. And again, as I said, we've been quite happy with our ability to keep driving that efficiency over time. So from our standpoint, again, not really a major shift in terms of what we've been doing for multiple years. We expect user growth to be a core contributor to our growth on the order side in particular.

Does ROI change that quickly on a weekly basis? Or is it more just shifting from the lower part of the funnel to the upper part of the funnel? Or how does that work?

Yes. It's not so much that it shifts on a weekly basis. It's more that we are constantly looking to find the lowest ROI spend and redeploy it towards something ROI. So you'll find yourself potentially experimenting with different things and saying, "Hey, let's try something. If that's working, we'll lean more into it. If I want to do that where am I funding it from? I'm going to look for whatever is at the bottom of that stack or you try something that doesn't work, we cut that quickly and we'll kind of go back to things that we know work. But again, we like to look across that full funnel to say, where do we find the most efficiencies, but also making sure that we're having a balanced approach because some of these things are very easy to measure and they're very direct feedback of you're driving an order today. Some other things are going to be longer term, a little bit harder to drive to measure the exact impact, but you know that across the full funnel, you need all components to work to make -- you need the brand marketing to work to make the last click attribution successful, right? So we know we need the full portfolio, and it's really about sort of balancing as we move through the quarters.

Yes, makes sense. Another -- in that multivariable growth equation, AOV is another one of the variables, and that's started to rise a bit. I think 3% increase, $113, a function of engagement as well as contribution from the club partners, the club stores as well. But how much of that improvement is structural versus temporary? And maybe how to think -- how should we think about the mix between larger weekly baskets and the smaller convenience-oriented orders?

Yes. This is an interesting one because similar to the question you asked earlier in terms of order frequency, I think, again, if you go back in time, AOV has been a strength for us in many ways, right, in terms of our large basket composition, in terms of our ability to address the weekly shop in a way that's quite unique to us. And you saw us increase basket size over that previous period. Now as we went into 2025, and we talked about this quite a bit at the time when we had a little bit of pressure on AOV, that was really coming from that mix of restaurants, which had lower AOV as well as the $10 minimum basket driving those smaller basket incremental orders. Now as I said, during that period of time, we specifically called out 2 things. One, that, that was happening. That was really the key driver. And so you'd expect that as you lap the adoption of those features, some of that headwind would go away. But at the same time, throughout the whole period, we also said that the underlying fundamental basket size was actually doing quite well. So what you're seeing now is we're lapping some of these specific features or services is really the underlying sort of fundamental -- back to your question, fundamental strength of our business. I think there's a couple of other things that I would point out. One is driven by engagement of existing users. So what happens is if you have users, they engage over time, they tend to shop more frequently and they tend to shop to have higher baskets over time. So you have these engaged users, that's going to drive up AOV over time. You also mentioned club, right? Club has been a strength for us. We've talked about that growing, particularly as consumers are value-oriented, but also because of proactive strategies we have on club, right? You've heard us talk about our Costco membership as a benefit, and that has driven strength in the club category. So I think there's more to come from that as well. And then we have a category of users that are business like, right? So restaurants that are ordering from retailers like Restaurant Depot. These are going to be larger basket orders as well. So it's a host of things, that are going to -- that have been driving this. And I think, again, I think about the 2025 headwinds more as an anomaly versus what you've seen as sort of overall strength in our large basket orders over time. The last thing I'll say, again, is just that we view this generally as a huge strength of ours. We are one of very few players that is operating in what is the largest segment of digital grocery, right? So 75% of online grocery is in large baskets, and that's where we play. It's where we're strong. So we obviously do operate and compete effectively in smaller basket orders, but we can take those small basket orders and unlike others, actually transition those to large baskets over time, but the bulk of our business is in these large orders.

Am I remembering correctly, though, that in various macro periods, the AOV for the weekly trip is fairly stable. It's what people are buying within that AOV that varies.

Yes, that's largely right. So there's -- yes, so the way I would think about it is to the extent that people are -- there's macro dynamics, inflation, et cetera, people tend to shop on a budget. And so if you have price inflation, you may have someone take an item out of the cart. Now that's a little different than if I'm shopping at a club retailer, my mental model is a little different, right? I think even you might think about that in your own daily life, you have your weekly shop and then you have your bigger stock-up shop. Those are going to be a little bit of a different price tag. And so you see that again with that club mix. And then again, as I said, when you have the business customer shopping from a restaurant depot, that's also going to be a very different -- that's less shopping on a budget. It's much more around what do I need to operate my business. So there's a couple of different dynamics at play. But broadly speaking, yes, we do see people adapt to changing prices in those environments.

I want to talk about the enterprise business. I think we characterized Instacart Enterprise as the Shopify of grocery. And back at the IPO, I think you had enterprise tech at about 20% of GTV with Storefront Pro powering a lot of partners. I mean, today, Costco, Publix, ALDI, Sprouts, right, forgetting anybody in there probably. But how do you -- or how should we measure your success there, the value you're providing from enterprise and how the strategy is unfolding?

Yes. So you did forget a few because we have 380-plus retail partners on Storefront Pro, but you've had a lot of the big ones. And actually, I think it actually highlights a really important point that I'll get to, but it's not just small retailers, right? Even think about the Shopify correlation that you mentioned, right, starts with the sort of long tail. But actually, what you see is that even the Costcos of the world are looking to us to be their technology partner because very few players can invest at the scale and speed that we can because we're able to invest on the marketplace side. We invest on the enterprise side. We can do it in a way that's just really differentiated. But back to your question in terms of overall strategy. Look, I think in terms of the proof points that you're looking for, hey, is this working? How do I understand the dynamic between marketplace and enterprise? I think the answer is it's reflected in our total company results. When we think about how we operate internally, you might think about it as sort of a suite of services that you're going and offering to a retail partner, right? So we go talk to them. We're talking about marketplace. We're talking about Storefront Pro and Carrot Ads and in-store products and a whole range of different things. Even within those that I mentioned, we're talking about do you want to bring your loyalty program online? Do you want to launch EBT SNAP or alcohol or it's quite a broad conversation. And so we truly think about our suite of services and that retailer relationship holistically across these products and services. So when we even price them, we're thinking about that from a retailer lens and a retailer-by-retailer basis and making sure that it makes sense for our business and obviously, for their business as well. When you kind of peel back the covers on what's happening and how these 2 things interplay, just some things to think about in terms of where they both reinforce but also drive efficiencies across the business would be, as an example, shopper efficiency, right? Like because we operate enterprise, we have a scale that drives shopper efficiencies that benefit the marketplace and vice versa. Carrot Ads or our ads ecosystem, not just Carrot Ads, but because of Carrot Ads, which is built on the back of SFP for the most part, we have a scale and a product and service that is really attractive to CPGs because they can come to us and advertise across our marketplace and over 310 Carrot Ads partners as well as additional partners that aren't even on our enterprise ecosystem. So there's just a number of things that make it such that an IC+, I didn't mention is something that works across both. So these parts of our business really truly work together. We think about them holistically. We manage the P&L holistically. And we think the proof is in the results in terms of the 9 quarters of double-digit growth, our ability to continue to execute on our profitability trajectory as well.

Maybe as a follow-up to that, are you seeing more urgency from traditional retailers for this type of investment, this transition, specifically because of increasing competition in the space from companies like Amazon and Walmart?

Yes, absolutely. I mean, look, I think it's a continuation of a trend, but we definitely have a lot of conversations. We often say, Chris, our CEO, is many times sort of the first call for many retailers after an announcement from one of those players. And that's because we are end of one in terms of the ability to bring this grocery-specific technology layer to the table for customers. I mean, you mentioned some of them that are -- you think, of course, Costco or all these players can do this themselves. And maybe they can, but they choose to partner with us because we have the ability to invest at a scale and pace that's going to only accelerate in terms of that technology innovation. And so we've been really well positioned to capitalize on what is a period of time where if you're a retailer, you're looking to modernize your e-com experience for your customers, but also you want to do so in a way that allows you to keep access to your customers to manage your brand, right, or to be able to present however it is you want, we can do both, right? We can provide that deep technology layer, integrations and you continue to have that storefront layer for your customers. So we think we're really well positioned. We think we're one of very few players that do that really effectively. And again, it's because of the interplay between marketplace and enterprise that we're able to do that.

Yes. I mean e-commerce is really complex. It's really difficult. And we see repeatedly the traditional retailers, particularly who try to go out on their own, end up choosing partners to really utilize those same technologies on a common platform. But does that urgency show up specifically? Is it Storefront Pro, Carrot Ads? Is it the in-store technology, the fulfillment and logistics? How does that show up specifically?

Yes. Look, it's everything. And I think one of the things that we view as a real strength of ours is we're able to provide effectively a menu of options for our partners. So you mentioned folks that try to go out and do it on their own and then kind of come back to an Instacart type partner. I mean, ALDI is a great example of that, right? ALDI came to Storefront Pro in Q1, and that's been really going well for them. And so we're seeing the benefits of everything we just talked about and a very concrete example of a player that is a massive industry player could do it on their own, did do it on their own and chose to come back to us. In terms of the product suite, the answer is it depends. But I would say the traditional sort of life cycle that we see is maybe we work with you on marketplace, then you come in through Storefront Pro or even Storefront, upgrade to Storefront Pro, expand the Carrot Ads, although I'd say increasingly, that was more the historical. Increasingly, if you turn on Storefront Pro, pretty much every one of those deals today comes with Carrot Ads out of the gate because I think we've pretty well proven the model with Carrot Ads and then in-store technology on top of that. AI solutions is a more nascent part of our portfolio, but we're seeing traction there as well. We had talked about some of our large partners like Kroger and Sprouts. We've seen many more come to the table since then, Woodman, Save Mart and others. And so it depends. It's retailer by retailer, but that's kind of generally storefront Pro is usually at the sort of heart of the conversation.

And is there a pattern that's emerged where you bring through Carrot Ads or Storefront Pro and then there's the ability to cross-sell, upsell over time?

Yes. Absolutely. And we've given some of these sort of stories, I think, in some of our communications, but I think Sprouts is a great example of what we call land and expand, but really starting with one product or service and then really, they are a great example of a retailer that has adopted practically every service that we offer. But at the same time, you have other retailers who don't need all of them. And that's great because you take a retailer that wants to have their own Storefront, but needs a fulfillment partner. Kroger is a great example of that, right? So one of the largest players in the U.S. market, but we're their exclusive fulfillment partner. So we get to participate because of our differentiated ability to execute on what is really complex, right? It's not picking up a bag and delivering it to a door. It is going into their store with picking tech and moving through that store efficiently, getting the customers what they want, which obviously is a high bar and then getting it to them. So we think that kind of menu of options approach is -- allows us to get in the door with retailers however they want to interact with us.

Yes. And moving to yet another growth variable or lever, international. Insta Leap is now a part of Instacart. And so maybe that's a good place to maybe talk about the international model. Is this primarily a capital-light opportunity for you? Where are you going to see the expansion of that business over time? Does it even extend out to fulfillment and logistics as well?

Yes. So the way I think about international is -- part of the reason that we think it is really attractive for us is as we've been talking to retailers in international markets, what we're seeing is a lot of the same challenges that our retailers had in the U.S. market facing the same challenges in largely European markets. And so that's, of course, interesting to us because we've built the technology already. And so we can take a lot of what we've built and bring that. And so to address the question directly, that's technology based, right? It's based on tech that we've already built and bringing that like a storefront type of experience to retailers that are facing similar challenges abroad. So I would say, look, we are being very disciplined about our approach. The intention is to be capital-light, existing technology, leading with options like Storefront Pro or options like paper or food storm. So there are other options, again, depending on what individual retailer is most interested in. But we think there's a way for us to do it in a way that is not going to be big heavy upfront investment, not immediately or in any sort of near-term plan thinking about a marketplace model. And Instaleap is a really interesting way that we think allows us to accelerate those ambitions. So Instaleap is pretty small. But what is interesting about it is, I would say, 2 to 3 things. One is their technology. So on the one hand, we have a lot of this technology ourselves, but they've been building specifically for international markets. And oftentimes, there's nuances about tech needs that international retailers are looking for that they have. So we think their technology, particularly on the fulfillment side, is quite complementary to what we have in-house. The second is relationships. So we have really deep long-standing relationships with U.S. and North American retailers. Those are different, and they've been at this for some time and have existing relationships that we think that we can leverage. And then last but not least is team. The team is really excellent. We've been really happy to integrate the team there and think that they can help us accelerate from an international perspective. So overall, excited about early days, but excited about the opportunity and what we're seeing.

Turning then to Agentic Commerce, another big topic here at this conference. But I think you've talked about building the gold standard of Agentic Grocery, specifically and also integrating with LLMs, ChatGPT, Cloud and now Gemini. So that being said, if agents become the new front door for commerce, what guardrails are you putting around data, around the economics, the user experience to ensure that these channels are incremental?

Yes. Maybe I'll just start by talking about our AI strategy broadly because I think it's important to understand that AI from a grocery lens is going to be different than many other industries, right? It's not just about sort of the front door. You have to actually connect that to what's on the shelf and then you have to get what's on the shelf to the customer, right? So there's a really important connectivity that happens between whatever interface the customer is engaging with. And we think that our 1.6 billion lifetime orders worth of data and understanding both what you're looking for as a consumer, but also real-time understanding of what's on the shelf brings together sort of the magic of the ability to actually get you what you're looking for to your door as a consumer. So we think the ultimate experience ultimately then happens within the Instacart ecosystem on the Instacart marketplace. And so that's really the focus for us. So we are building AI into experiences really from end to end, whether that's personalization that takes into consideration the context of what you've already put into your basket or your history so that we're able to offer things up that are more attuned to what you're likely looking for or down to CART Assistant, which we've launched to 25% of our users in the U.S. So it's still early days there, but we're starting to see some really interesting behavior from early adopters around more complex tasks. So tax. So recipe -- searching for recipe, meal planning, building the larger baskets, which can take time. So we actually view AI as something that can really be an accelerant to the overall industry because it takes something that's complex, right? Building your first basket can be time consuming. If we can make that quicker, easier for you, more efficient, that's really compelling. So then we can take all of that, including CART Assistant and bring that to our owned and retail owned and operated sites -- so CART Assistant, we will -- you'll see us roll that out with some of our partners as well. And then I think of the 3P partnerships with the OpenAI, Anthropics and Googles of the world as ways to tap into incremental consumer demand. Now why incremental? That is what we're seeing today. It's very early on a small number. But again, if the experience is much better within our ecosystem, we think ultimately, people will go to what is the best experience. But if I'm able to be in front of the customer wherever they are and tap into potentially new pools of customers, that's definitely the right strategy for us and how we're thinking about it. Now in what construct am I willing to do that, only one where data is really -- is sort of front and center in terms of our data rights, in terms of protection of data, not having those players able to use our data to train their models in any way. So I'd say we're quite focused on data when it comes to the nature of those contracts, but we feel very good about the way that we've been able to craft it such that we're very protected, and we maintain what we view as the primary asset here, which is that very deep understanding of consumer behavior when it comes to grocery specifically.

And as those AI surfaces or applications scale, how are you managing or how are you thinking about margins related to those, managing the token and the infrastructure costs associated with usage of those?

Yes. So there's a couple of different flavors, I would say, around token usage or the way that I think about it anyway. There's token usage that's specific to, we'll call it, like internal efficiency, right? So you could think my team using tokens or the engineering team using tokens to do their job better, faster, more efficiently. And that, I think, is, to some extent, simply how you manage any cost in the P&L. It's just another version of that, how you manage headcount costs, how you manage subscription costs and other things. And so to the extent that you're seeing an increase in cost there, we're thinking about, well, am I seeing efficiencies from it? Am I seeing return? Can I hire less quickly than I was expecting because I'm able to do the work of what would have been an additional hire. If not, then I've got to really question those costs. And so I think about it really as a flexible approach. Now it requires because things are moving very quickly and costs can move fast, it requires a very flexible approach to say, okay, this is something we're monitoring very real time. My team works very, very closely hand-in-hand with R&D to make sure we understand exactly what usage looks like on a regular basis. And do we need to make adjustments either to the spend side of the equation? Or do I need to make adjustments elsewhere in the P&L to offset those costs because we actually like what we see. The other component is obviously the usage of tokens for some of these products and services. And that's really around are we seeing the output? Do we see increases in customer engagement in those kind of metrics that drive return. So those things sometimes take time, but that's sort of the mental model of how I think about those things. But I don't expect any sort of margin impact in the short term. We're definitely actively managing the impact.

Got it. Well, unfortunately, we're going to have to end there. Emily, thank you so much for your time, and I could ask many more questions, but I appreciate you coming.

Thank you so much. Appreciate the time.