The company, the idea for which was seeded by an empty refrigerator in the founder's apartment, went public recently and was valued at over $12 billion
(File) Instacart founder and CEO Apoorva Mehta, stands in the Bi-Rite Market on Divisadero Street on Thursday, July 24, 2014 in San Francisco, Calif.
Image: Lea Suzuki/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
An empty refrigerator. That’s what it took to change Apoorva Mehta’s life.
The son of immigrant parents, who went from India to Libya and Canada, Mehta is a newly-minted billionaire worth a staggering $1.3 billion, while a company that he founded—thanks to the inspiration he found from an empty refrigerator—is worth $12 billion.
The 37-year-old Mehta is the founder of Instacart, a grocery delivery platform with over 7.7 million users and a network of over 80,000 stores in the US, and, until yesterday, served as the company’s chairman. Instacart went public on September 18 after a $9.9 billion IPO in the US and since then has rallied to be valued at over $12 billion.
“More than a decade ago, I was sitting in my apartment in San Francisco bemoaning the fact that the only thing I had in my refrigerator was hot sauce,” Mehta wrote on LinkedIn soon after his company went public. “Don’t get me wrong, I love hot sauce, but you can’t exactly make it a meal.”