Instacart

Anduril

Instacart

Instacart operates as a marketplace connecting consumers with personal shoppers and grocery retailers. Revenue comes from multiple streams: delivery fees and service fees charged to consumers (typically $3.99+ per delivery), tips to shoppers (passed through, not revenue), retailer partnerships (grocers pay Instacart for access to the platform and fulfillment services), and advertising.

Advertising has become the crown jewel. Instacart Ads lets consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands like Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, and Nestlé pay for sponsored product placements within the Instacart shopping experience.

When someone searches for "chips," Doritos can pay to appear first. This is incredibly valuable because it's advertising at the exact moment of purchase intent.

Ad revenue was $871 million in 2023 and crossed $950 million in 2024.

The retailer partnership model is key. Unlike DoorDash or Uber Eats (which listed restaurants without permission early on), Instacart works with grocers as partners.

Over 1,500 retail banners including Costco, Kroger, Albertsons, and Publix have formal partnerships. Instacart provides the technology and shoppers.

Grocers provide inventory and stores.

Anduril

Anduril flips the traditional defense business model. Instead of cost-plus contracts where the government pays for development, Anduril invests its own capital in R&D and sells finished products.

This means they own the intellectual property and can sell the same platform to multiple customers — the US military, allied nations, and potentially commercial clients.

Revenue comes from hardware sales (drones, autonomous vehicles, sensor towers), software licensing (the Lattice operating system), and service contracts for deployment and maintenance. The company has won contracts with the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, US Special Operations Command, and allied militaries including the UK and Australia.

The venture-funded approach lets them move at startup speed. While Lockheed might take 7 years to develop a new system, Anduril can prototype in months and iterate based on field feedback.

The trade-off is massive upfront investment — they have raised more than $11 billion in venture capital to fund this approach.

Instacart

Apoorva Mehta was a 26-year-old Amazon engineer in Seattle who quit his job in 2012 to start a company. The only problem: he had no idea what to build.

Over the next year, he started and abandoned roughly 20 different projects. A social network for lawyers.

A way to track restaurant wait times. Nothing stuck.

Then one day he was too lazy to go grocery shopping. He looked for a service that would shop for him and deliver everything to his door.

Nothing good existed. The existing options were grocery store delivery services that only worked during specific windows, had limited selection, and required ordering days in advance.

Mehta wanted to order groceries the way he ordered everything else online — immediately, from whatever store he wanted.

He built a prototype in 2012 and applied to Y Combinator. The demo was rough — he ordered a six-pack of beer through the app and had it delivered to a YC partner's house during the application process.

It worked. He got in.

Instacart launched in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2013 with a simple promise: order from your favorite local grocery store and have someone shop for you and deliver within an hour.

Anduril

Palmer Luckey was already famous — and controversial — before Anduril. He founded Oculus VR at 18, sold it to Facebook for $2 billion at 21, and then was fired in 2017 after a political donation scandal.

He was 24 years old, already worth hundreds of millions, and suddenly had nothing to do.

Luckey teamed up with Trae Stephens, a Founders Fund partner who had previously worked at Palantir and as a member of the Trump transition team's Department of Defense group. They saw the same problem from different angles: the US military was spending billions on outdated technology from legacy contractors (Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing) while China was rapidly modernizing.

The Pentagon's procurement process was broken — it took 10-15 years and billions of dollars to develop and deploy new weapons systems.

Anduril was founded in mid-2017 with a radical approach: build the technology first with venture capital, then sell finished products to the government. Traditional defense contractors get cost-plus contracts — they bill the government for development costs plus a margin, which incentivizes slow development and cost overruns.

Anduril said: we'll fund our own R&D, build the product, and sell it off the shelf. If it doesn't work, we eat the cost.

The name comes from the reforged sword of Aragorn in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings — a weapon that was broken and made new.

Instacart

Instacart grew by solving a problem one city at a time. They launched in San Francisco, proved the model, then expanded to other major metros.

Each new market required recruiting shoppers, signing up retailers, and building enough consumer density to make the economics work.

The COVID-19 pandemic was the inflection point. Grocery delivery went from luxury to necessity overnight.

In March 2020 Instacart announced it would add 300,000 shoppers, then raised that by another 250,000 weeks later. Order volume increased 500%.

Years of planned growth happened in weeks. The pandemic proved that grocery delivery wasn't a niche — it was the future of how a significant chunk of the population would shop.

The enterprise play is the long-term moat. By providing white-label technology to grocers, Instacart becomes embedded in their operations.

Even if a grocery chain wanted to build its own delivery service, they'd need years and hundreds of millions to replicate what Instacart provides. The more deeply integrated Instacart becomes in grocery operations, the harder it is to rip out.

Anduril

Anduril's growth strategy is classic disruption — enter at the low end of the market with cheaper, faster products and expand upward. They started with border security (relatively low-stakes) and moved into counter-drone systems (active combat relevant), then into autonomous vehicles and munitions (core defense).

International sales are a major growth vector. Anduril has contracts with the UK Ministry of Defence, the Australian Defence Force, and other Five Eyes allies.

The AUKUS defense pact between the US, UK, and Australia specifically calls for technology sharing in areas where Anduril specializes.

The Ukraine war was an inflection point. It demonstrated that small, cheap, autonomous drones could be decisive in modern warfare — exactly the kind of systems Anduril builds.

Suddenly, every military in the world wanted what Anduril was selling, and wanted it fast. The order book has grown into the billions and the company has raised at valuations no defence startup had ever reached.

Instacart

The post-COVID hangover was brutal. After pandemic demand normalized, growth slowed dramatically.

The company's valuation dropped from a peak of $39 billion in early 2021 to about $10 billion at IPO in September 2023. Investors who bought at the peak saw a 75% paper loss.

The narrative shifted from "essential infrastructure" to "nice-to-have luxury."

Unit economics are perpetually tight. Paying a person to walk through a grocery store, pick items, bag them, and drive them to someone's house is expensive.

Unlike meal delivery (one restaurant, one bag), grocery delivery involves dozens of items per order, refrigeration requirements, and substitution decisions. Every order that requires a shopper to call the customer about an out-of-stock item eats into efficiency.

Amazon is the existential threat. Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods delivery, and Amazon's own logistics network represent a competitor with nearly unlimited resources and a Prime membership base of 200+ million.

Amazon has been willing to lose billions on grocery delivery to build market share. Instacart's advantage is retailer partnerships — Kroger and Publix use Instacart specifically because they don't want to help Amazon dominate grocery.

Anduril

The ethical debate around autonomous weapons is constant and unavoidable. Anduril builds systems that can identify and engage targets with varying degrees of human oversight.

Critics argue this is a step toward fully autonomous killing machines. Anduril maintains that a human is always "in the loop" for lethal decisions, but the line between "in the loop" and "on the loop" (supervising but not directly controlling) is blurry.

Recruiting is both an advantage and a challenge. Anduril pays Silicon Valley salaries and offers startup equity, which attracts top engineers who might never consider working for Raytheon.

But some engineers refuse to work on weapons systems on principle. Google famously dropped Project Maven (a Pentagon AI contract) after employee protests.

Anduril leans into the controversy — they explicitly look for people who are comfortable building defense technology.

Scaling manufacturing is the next hurdle. Software companies scale effortlessly.

Hardware companies that build drones, missiles, and autonomous vehicles need factories, supply chains, and quality control at defense-grade standards. Anduril is building a massive manufacturing facility to produce thousands of autonomous systems, but transitioning from prototype to mass production is where many defense startups fail.

Instacart

Instacart Marketplace — the core platform where consumers order groceries from 80,000+ stores for delivery or pickup, with personal shoppers fulfilling orders. Instacart+ — subscription service ($9.99/month) offering free delivery on orders over $35, reduced service fees, and credit back on pickup orders.

Instacart Ads — a retail media platform letting CPG brands run sponsored product listings, display ads, and coupons within the shopping experience. Instacart Platform (Enterprise) — white-label e-commerce technology that lets grocers build their own online ordering and fulfillment powered by Instacart's infrastructure.

Caper Cart — AI-powered smart shopping carts (from the 2021 Caper AI acquisition) with built-in screens, barcode scanners, and payment that let shoppers skip the checkout line.

Anduril

Lattice — an AI-powered operating system that fuses sensor data from multiple sources into a single real-time picture of the battlefield. Think of it as the central nervous system that connects all of Anduril's hardware.

Ghost — a family of small autonomous aircraft (drones) designed for surveillance, electronic warfare, and strike missions. Ranging from handheld to medium-altitude.

Anvil — an autonomous counter-drone system that physically intercepts enemy drones by ramming into them mid-air. Yes, a kamikaze drone that kills other drones.

Sentry Tower — autonomous surveillance towers originally deployed on the US-Mexico border for border security, using AI to detect and classify objects and people. Altius — a family of tube-launched autonomous munitions that can loiter over an area and strike targets with precision.

Instacart

Sequoia Capital was an early and consistent backer. Andreessen Horowitz invested in growth rounds.

D1 Capital Partners led the 2021 round that valued Instacart at $39 billion. Existing investors including Valiant Capital, T.

Rowe Price, Fidelity, and Tiger Global participated across rounds. Y Combinator was the starting point (Summer 2012 batch).

The September 2023 IPO on NASDAQ priced at $30 per share, valuing the company at approximately $10 billion.

Anduril

Andreessen Horowitz has been the most prominent backer, leading multiple rounds. Founders Fund (Peter Thiel's firm) invested early — Trae Stephens was a Founders Fund partner before co-founding Anduril.

General Catalyst, Valor Equity Partners, and 8VC (Joe Lonsdale, another Palantir co-founder) also invested. The Series F in 2024 valued the company at $14 billion, and successive rounds took it to $30.5 billion in 2025 and past $60 billion after that.

Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, and Sands Capital participated in later rounds.