Instacart has hired one of Facebook’s top female executives as its new CEO, ahead of a possible IPO on Wall Street.
Fidji Simo, who most recently served as a vice president and head of the Facebook App, will succeed Instacart cofounder Apoorva Mehta as the fast-growing grocery delivery service’s CEO. Simo becomes the first female CEO of a large on-demand delivery company, which is rumored to be considering going public.
In a letter to the Instacart community Thursday announcing the news, Mehta said Simo was “at Facebook during its transition from a private company to the public market and understands what it takes to lead and scale a transformational company.”
“I believe that with Fidji at the helm we’ll be in an even stronger position to realize our full potential and I look forward to working with her in our journey ahead,” said Mehta, who will transition into the role of executive chairman of the board.
Simo, who joined Instacart’s board of directors earlier this year and will take over as CEO on August 2, will inherit a company that has seen a massive increase in customer and investor demand as a result of the pandemic. Since the pandemic began, the company’s value has doubled twice. It was valued at $39 billion in March.
Simo joined Facebook in 2011 and has worked there for the past ten years. She was in charge of Facebook’s app development and strategy, which included the News Feed, Stories, Groups, Video, and Marketplace services. She had previously worked for eBay, where she was a member of the company’s strategy team.
Simo made it clear in a lengthy Facebook post on Thursday that she would use her experience working at Facebook, where she helped design the company’s advertising business, to help grow Instacart’s still-developing ad sales operation. “I can’t wait to work with big and small [consumer packaged goods] companies to help them get their products discovered,” she said.
In March, Instacart CEO Nilam Ganenthiran told CNN Business that the company’s goal is to build “a leading advertising platform that supports the entire grocery ecosystem.”
