Compare / Instacart vs Pinterest
INSTACART
Apoorva Mehta failed at 20 startups before building the one that got your groceries delivered during a pandemi…
Ben Silbermann built a virtual pinboard for collecting pretty pictures and accidentally created one of the mos…
AT A GLANCE
FUNDING HISTORY
Instacart
BUSINESS MODEL
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.
Pinterest makes money through advertising — specifically through "Promoted Pins" that look nearly identical to organic content. This is the magic of Pinterest's business model: ads don't interrupt the experience because the experience IS discovering products and ideas.
A promoted pin for a kitchen knife set appears right alongside organic pins of kitchen designs. The user doesn't distinguish between "ad" and "content" because both serve the same purpose.
Shopping ads are the fastest-growing segment. Brands upload their product catalogs, Pinterest matches products to user searches and boards, and users can buy directly through the platform or click through to the retailer's site.
Pinterest gets paid per click or per thousand impressions.
Revenue reached $3.65 billion in 2024, up from $3.05 billion the year before, and 2024 was its first genuinely profitable year. Average revenue per user is growing but still well below Meta's — the upside is enormous if Pinterest can close that gap.
HOW THEY STARTED
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.
Ben Silbermann was a former Google ad operations employee who quit in 2008 to build apps. His first attempt was an iPhone app called Tote — essentially a mobile catalog that let women browse and bookmark products from fashion retailers.
Nobody downloaded it. But Silbermann noticed something in the data: users were saving products obsessively.
The collecting behavior was more interesting than the shopping behavior.
He teamed up with Paul Sciarra, a classmate from Yale, and Evan Sharp, a designer who was studying architecture at Columbia. Together they built Pinterest — a visual bookmarking tool that let people "pin" images from around the internet to organized boards.
Think of it as a digital mood board that anyone could make.
Pinterest launched as an invite-only beta in March 2010. Growth was painfully slow at first.
Silbermann personally wrote to the first 5,000 users, giving them his phone number and asking what they wanted. The early community was overwhelmingly women interested in home decor, fashion, recipes, and DIY projects.
By 2011, Time magazine named Pinterest one of the 50 best websites. By 2012, it was the fastest site in history to reach 10 million unique monthly visitors.
HOW THEY GREW
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.
Pinterest grew organically through women sharing boards with each other. The weddings use case was the killer app — brides-to-be would create boards for dresses, venues, flowers, and invitations, then share them with their wedding parties.
That viral loop drove millions of signups.
SEO is the secret weapon. Pinterest pages rank extremely well in Google Image Search.
Someone searching "modern living room ideas" often sees Pinterest results on page one. That drives a large stream of organic traffic from people who were not looking for Pinterest at all.
Unlike other social platforms, which compete with Google for attention, Pinterest quietly benefits from it.
The shopping pivot has been the growth unlock. Under CEO Bill Ready (former Google and PayPal executive who took over in 2022), Pinterest aggressively invested in shopping features — catalog integrations, buyable pins, merchant verification, and visual search for products.
The thesis: Pinterest users are already in a shopping mindset, so removing friction between "I like this" and "I bought this" is the straightforward path to revenue growth.
THE HARD PART
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.
Pinterest's demographics are both an advantage and a limitation. The platform skews heavily female (over 60% women) and is strongest in home, fashion, food, and weddings.
Expanding beyond these categories to attract male users, younger demographics, and different use cases has been slow.
Competition for ad dollars is fierce. Pinterest competes with Meta, Google, TikTok, and Amazon for advertising budgets.
Most advertisers allocate the bulk of their spend to Meta and Google first, then consider others. Pinterest needs to prove its return on ad spend is competitive to win larger budget allocations.
Creator economy is underdeveloped. While Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have massive creator ecosystems with monetization tools, Pinterest has historically been about content discovery, not content creation.
Users pin other people's content — the original creators often don't even know their work is on Pinterest. Building a creator program and driving original content creation on the platform has been a recent focus but lags far behind competitors.
THE PRODUCTS
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.
Pinterest Home Feed — the core discovery surface showing personalized pins based on user interests, boards, and search history. Pinterest Lens — visual search technology that lets users take a photo of any object and find similar items to buy on Pinterest.
Pinterest Shopping — integrated e-commerce allowing users to browse and purchase products directly from pins linked to retailer catalogs. Pinterest Boards — the organizing system where users save and categorize pins into collections, used for wedding planning, home renovation, recipes, fashion, and more.
Pinterest Shuffles — a collage-making app for Gen Z users to create aesthetic mood boards, driving younger user adoption.
WHO BACKED THEM
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.
Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz were early investors. Fidelity and Valiant Capital participated in later rounds.
Rakuten invested strategically. The April 2019 IPO raised $1.4 billion at a $12.7 billion valuation.
Elliott Management, the activist investor, took a large stake in 2022 and pushed for operational improvements that contributed to the company's path to profitability.