Instacart said on Thursday before the expected wallet in 2021 that Goldman Sachs’ leading internet banker would be named as its next chief financial officer.
Nick Giovanni, currently head of Goldman Sachs’ technology, media and telecommunications group, will join Instacart on January 27, succeeding Sagar Sanghvi, the company’s chief financial officer for the past five years.
Instacart has become one of the most valuable private companies in the US over the past year. A fundraising round in 2020 more than doubled its valuation from the beginning of the year to $ 17.7 billion. It is now one of the most anticipated initial public offerings of 2021, following high-tech one-touch IPOs for Airbnb and DoorDash in 2020. Goldman Sachs is reportedly the leader of the IPO and can run the grocery delivery app at approx. Valued at $ 30 billion.
For the past few years, Giovanni has been a chief advisor for some of the most popular technology deals, including IPOs for Airbnb and Doordash, the direct listing of Slack and Dragoneer’s SPAC.
Giovanni has served as an advisor to Instacart in his role at Goldman since 2015, leading several rounds of financing and key transactions.
He is the youngest Goldman Sachs CEO to leave the bank for a senior position at a client. Anthony Noto was a co-head of TMT Investment Banking at Goldman before joining Twitter in 2014 as CFO. Twitter promotes Noto to COO and hires its former Goldman colleague Ned Segal in 2017 as the new chief financial officer. Noto leaves Twitter in early 2018 to become CEO of fintech startup SoFi.
Other tech companies have hired Wall Street veterans as chief financial officers. Alphabet hired Ruth Porat in 2015, a former CFO of Morgan Stanley. Jack Dorsey hired Sarah Friar, a managing director of Goldman Sachs, as CFO at Square before leaving to become CEO of Nextdoor on social media. And before the recent IPO, Doordash appointed Prabir Adarkar as chief financial officer, a former vice president of Goldman’s TMT investment banking group.
Goldman Sachs partners Sam Britton and Matt Gibson will succeed Giovanni as co-heads of the bank’s global TMT group.
Apacorva Mehta, CEO of Instacart, said in an interview with CNBC that he is excited to welcome Giovanni to the team.
“The size and scale we achieve requires that we have an excellent group of people around the table,” he said.
Instacart saw demand for grocery deliveries rise amid the coronavirus pandemic. “We’ve seen five years of growth in five weeks,” Mehta added. “Our business continues to grow with a larger volume of transactions in December by 300%.”
Instacart has built a deep bank over the past few years, focusing primarily on expanding the business to business and advertising.
Instacart chief executive officer Seth Dallaire joined Amazon in 2019, where he led the global advertising sales business. Similarly, Instacart’s chief technology officer, Mark Schaaf, was in charge of mobile display advertising engineering at Google and was CTO at Thumbtack before joining the company.
Mehta said the leasing process will continue until 2021, as they will increase the number of people by 50% in the next six months.