Instacart

Dandy

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 exceeded $900 million in 2023.

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.

Dandy

Vertical SaaS plus manufacturing. Dandy provides dental practices with intraoral scanners (often subsidized or free to eliminate the switching cost), cloud-based software for managing cases, and its own network of digital dental labs that manufacture the final restorations.

Dentists pay per case — each crown, bridge, veneer, or implant restoration is priced individually. The margin comes from manufacturing efficiency: digital workflows are faster, more precise, and require less manual labor than traditional hand-sculpted methods.

As volume grows, Dandy's labs get more efficient and per-unit costs drop. It's the classic razor-and-blades model — give away the scanner, make money on every restoration.

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.

Dandy

Henry Stott was a repeat entrepreneur who had previously co-founded a tech company in the UK. When he looked at the dental industry, he saw a $15 billion lab market that was shockingly analog.

Here's how it worked: a dentist jams a tray of gooey putty into your mouth, waits for it to harden, mails the physical mold to a dental lab, where a technician hand-sculpts your crown out of ceramic. Turnaround: 2 to 3 weeks.

Error rate: high. Patient experience: miserable.

The technology to do this digitally had existed for years — 3D intraoral scanners, CAD/CAM software, CNC milling machines — but nobody had stitched it into a seamless end-to-end platform for the average dental practice. Stott started Dandy in 2020 to be that platform.

Provide the scanner, build the software, run the lab — and make it so easy that any dentist can switch from analog to digital without changing how they practice.

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 hired 300,000 new shoppers in a single month. 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.

Dandy

Land-and-expand with dental practices. Dandy gives practices the scanner for free or at heavy discount, which eliminates the biggest barrier to switching from analog.

Once a practice starts submitting digital scans, they become recurring revenue — every patient who needs a crown is a Dandy order. Sales team targets mid-size practices (3 to 10 dentists) that are high-volume but haven't invested in digital yet.

Referral programs where existing dentists recommend Dandy to colleagues. Geographic density strategy — build lab capacity in a region, then saturate practices nearby to optimize logistics and turnaround times.

Content marketing educating dentists on why digital is better, faster, and more profitable than analog workflows.

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.

Dandy

Dental practices are notoriously resistant to change — many dentists have used the same lab for 20 years and switching feels risky. The scanner hardware is expensive to subsidize at scale, creating a capital-intensive land grab.

Quality control across distributed manufacturing is hard — a crown that doesn't fit means a remake, an unhappy patient, and a dentist who might switch back to their old lab. Competition from established digital players like Align Technology and legacy lab companies investing in their own digital capabilities.

The dental industry is fragmented — 200,000+ practices in the US, mostly small businesses, which means enterprise-style sales don't work. Each practice is its own decision maker with its own habits.

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.

Dandy

Dandy Scanner — provided to dental practices, captures a full 3D digital impression of the patient's mouth in minutes. No more putty molds.

Cloud-based case management platform where dentists submit scans, approve designs, and track orders. AI-powered restoration design that generates crown and veneer designs automatically from 3D scans, reducing turnaround from weeks to days.

Digital dental lab network with automated CNC milling and 3D printing for manufacturing restorations. Shade matching technology using AI to color-match restorations to surrounding teeth.

Integration with practice management software so cases flow seamlessly from scan to delivery.

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.

Dandy

Investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, IVP, DST Global, and IA Ventures. Series C in 2023 valued the company at approximately $1.8 billion.