Instacart Q2 2026 Earnings Call - AI Assistant Rollout and Enterprise Scale Drive 14% GTV Growth

Operator, Conference Call Operator: Good day. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Instacart second quarter 2026 financial results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker’s presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. You will hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Rebecca Yoshiyama, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Rebecca Yoshiyama, Vice President of Investor Relations, Instacart: Thank you, operator. Welcome everyone to Instacart’s second quarter 2026 earnings call. On the call with me today are Chris Rogers, our Chief Executive Officer, and Emily Reuter, our Chief Financial Officer. During today’s call, we will make forward-looking statements related to our business plans and strategy, developments in the grocery industry, and our future performance and prospects, including our expectations regarding our financial results and share repurchases. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. You can find more information about these risks and uncertainties in our SEC filings, including our most recently filed Form 10-K or Form 10-Q. We assume no obligation to update these statements after today’s call, except as required by law.

In addition, we’ll also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures, which have limitations and should not be considered in isolation from or as a substitute for our GAAP results. A reconciliation between these GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures is included in our press release, which can be found on our investor relations website. I’ll turn the call over to Chris for his opening remarks.

Chris Rogers, Chief Executive Officer, Instacart: Thanks, Rebecca. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Our business is performing incredibly well. We’ve meaningfully accelerated our growth over the past three quarters, including a strong Q2 performance, where we grew GTV 14% year-over-year. We also increased total revenue by 14%, driven by a stronger than expected advertising and other revenue performance, which grew 16% and again, outpaced GTV growth. At the same time, we expanded adjusted EBITDA and operating cash flow year-over-year, reflecting our continued focus on driving profitability while reinvesting for growth. These results reflect broad-based momentum across our business. We’re continuing to improve the customer experience on our leading online grocery marketplace, accelerate adoption of our enterprise technologies with retailers, and expand the breadth and depth of our advertising ecosystem. That momentum is showing up in our customer base.

Over the past three quarters, we’ve activated net new customers at our fastest year-over-year growth rates since 2022, helping drive strong monthly customer growth while we’ve continued to deepen customer engagement. With that, let me walk you through how we’re executing across our growth engines. Starting with marketplace. Our fundamentals remain strong because we’re relentlessly focused on delivering the best end-to-end grocery experience. One of our biggest advantages is our data. We’ve completed more than 1.6 billion lifetime orders, built a catalog of over 2 billion products, and operate at a scale where our shopper network visits large format stores an average of more than 15 times a day. Every day, we generate more than 10 million inventory signals that help us understand what’s actually available on store shelves in real time. Every order placed, item picked, and substitution completed makes that understanding even stronger.

That gives us a structural advantage that’s incredibly difficult to replicate, and it allows us to build better grocery experiences with every order. We’re using that advantage to continuously improve order quality, which we know is one of the most important drivers of repeat customer behavior. In Q2, we improved both our found rate and perfect order fill rate year-over-year for the 16th consecutive quarter. We’re building on that momentum with new capabilities that make shopping more personalized and orders even more accurate. This quarter, we began testing personalized health tags and nutrition scores, which help customers discover products that better match their dietary preferences. Customers will start seeing simple indicators that identify products aligned with their nutritional preferences and make it easier to compare options while they shop. We’re also making replacements more personalized with a new model that better incorporates customers’ dietary preferences.

If a customer’s preferred product is out of stock, we’re much more likely to recommend a relevant replacement such as gluten-free, low sugar, or allergen-free. Beyond improving today’s customer experience, we’re continuing to invest in what we believe is one of Instacart’s biggest advantages, inventory intelligence. In July, we acquired Arpalis, whose computer vision technology turns a quick video scan into a highly accurate view of what’s actually on the shelf. By combining Arpalis’s technology with our operating scale and network of approximately 600,000 shoppers, we expect to drive additional fulfillment efficiency, enable more relevant AI-powered shopping experiences, and further strengthen our inventory intelligence. Our data advantage is helping us build the gold standard in agentic grocery shopping. Our AI assistant doesn’t simply recommend recipes or generic product pairings. It understands a customer’s preferences, recent purchase history, what’s actually available at nearby stores, and current promotions.

It turns those insights into an order that’s ready to be placed and delivered in as fast as an hour. Customers are already using our AI assistant to quickly restock their essentials, find deals and discounts, order ingredients from recipe suggestions, discover new products, and plan meals. Orders placed with our AI assistant are, on average, larger than our typical basket. That’s especially notable given our industry-leading average order value of $115. We’re excited to build on this momentum and launch our AI assistant across our marketplace in North America over the next several weeks. We remain focused on affordability, which we know is one of our biggest opportunities to accelerate online grocery adoption. Retailers that offer no markups on item prices continue to drive faster growth and stronger customer retention.

Instacart already has more retailers offering online grocery delivery with no markups than any other third-party marketplace in North America, and we’re continuing to extend that advantage. Grocery Outlet is eliminating markups nationwide across our marketplace, alongside regional favorites like Strack & Van Til and Super King Markets. New partners including Ace Hardware, Calgary Co-op, Tractor Supply Company, and World Market are also launching with no markups right out of the gate. The same scale and innovation that powers our marketplace also makes us a trusted technology partner for retailers’ owned and operated channels. Retailers increasingly choose Instacart because we’ve already solved the hardest problems in online grocery. We bring those capabilities together in one connected platform spanning e-commerce, fulfillment, in-store, retail media, and AI, while keeping retailers’ brand, customer relationships, and data their own.

Our enterprise platform continues to be led by our e-commerce Storefront solution, which powers more than 380 grocery sites and helps retailers drive incremental growth and stronger customer engagement. Recently, we launched Storefront Pro with new partners like Calgary Co-op, Dierbergs, and more, and Aldi’s Q1 launch on Storefront Pro in the U.S. is already performing ahead of our expectations. We’re bringing that same innovation into retailers’ physical stores, where most grocery shopping still happens. Caper, our AI-powered smart cart, continues to scale with both new and existing partners, including Weis Markets and Lakesfront in the U.S., and now Morrisons in the U.K. We’re also seeing strong momentum with Foodstorm, our order management system for retailers’ catering, prepared foods, deli, and bakery departments. These perimeter sales are an important source of customer loyalty, and they drive high-margin revenue for retailers.

Recently, Costco launched Foodstorm-powered online ordering and delivery for custom cakes and party platters nationwide, digitizing an experience that was previously available only in the warehouse. We also signed Big Y for a chain-wide rollout of online catering and in-store shelf ordering kiosks, while Sprouts is expected to launch in-store kiosks across its California locations later this year. As part of our enterprise offering, we’re taking the AI technology that we’ve built on our marketplace, and we’re offering it to retailers. In Q2, we signed new AI solution partners including Stew Leonard’s, MAR Companies, and Woodman’s, each for Agentic Analytics, our solution that transforms a retailer’s own data into instant actionable insights. These three retailers, in addition to Harmons, also signed for our white label AI assistant. We’re also expanding our enterprise platform internationally beyond North America.

Earlier this year, we launched Storefront Pro with Costco in France and Spain, which continues to perform well. Instaleap, which we acquired in Q2, is expanding our international reach and recently signed a new picking technology partnership with Morrisons, one of the United Kingdom’s largest supermarket chains. All of this growth across marketplace and enterprise strengthens our advertising and data offering. Our strategy to diversify both supply and demand across our ecosystem continues to gain momentum, and in Q2, advertising and other revenue grew 16% year-over-year, once again outpacing GTV growth. Our marketplace and network of curated partners continues to grow as more e-commerce platforms turn to Instacart to power their retail media. This gives brands a simpler way to reach high-intent grocery customers across more retailers at a time when they’re looking to manage fewer retail media networks.

That attracts more brands to Instacart, encourages existing partners to invest more, and creates a stronger, more resilient advertising ecosystem. We continue to add new optimization tools to help advertisers achieve more of their goals. We recently rolled out AI-powered recommendations in Ads Manager to all advertisers, helping them improve performance through campaign and creative recommendations. In Q2, we began testing our Grow objective, which helps brands increase customer lifetime value by driving more repeat purchases, and we expanded our Acquire objective to display ads, helping brands reach more new customers. We are also introducing new ad formats that give brands more ways to engage customers. Our new Immersive Feed brings the kind of recipe and meal inspiration customers already enjoy on other platforms to Instacart in a shoppable vertical video format that helps brands drive discovery, engagement, and incremental reach.

Finally, we are extending the value of Instacart’s first-party data beyond our own platform. Brands increasingly want to use our insights wherever they already buy media, and our collaboration with Pinterest is a great example. In Q2, we made our Pinterest self-service offering available to all CPG partners, allowing advertisers to use Instacart audiences and closed-loop measurements in campaigns that they buy through Pinterest. Overall, I am excited by the momentum that we are driving across our business. As the leading grocery technology platform in a massive and still under-penetrated category, we continue to see a tremendous opportunity to attract more customers, retailers, brands, and shoppers to Instacart. Customers come to us for a shopping experience that continues to get better through more selection, quality, affordability, and convenience. Retailers choose us for our technology that helps them grow on Instacart and on their own digital channels and in their stores.

Brands value our scaled full-funnel advertising ecosystem that delivers measurable results, and shoppers turn to Instacart for flexible earning opportunities. Each part of our platform strengthens the others. That is what makes Instacart unique, and it is what gives us further confidence in our ability to drive durable, profitable growth over the long term. With that, I will turn it over to Emily to walk through the financials.

Emily Reuter, Chief Financial Officer, Instacart: Thank you, Chris, and hello, everyone. We delivered strong Q2 results, reflecting broad-based strength across our platform and our operating model. In Q2, GTV was $10.35 billion, up 14% year-over-year, primarily driven by orders of 90.3 million, up 9% year-over-year. As expected, GTV growth outpaced orders growth, with orders growth performing in line with our expectations, primarily driven by growth in monthly customers. Average order value of $115 was up 4% year-over-year, reflecting the ongoing deepening of customer engagement across our platform and strong performance from club retailers, which tend to have larger AOVs. Transaction revenue was $746 million, up 13% year-over-year, representing 7.2% of GTV compared to 7.3% in Q2 2025. The slight year-over-year decrease as a percent of GTV was primarily driven by lower payment revenue, offset by an increase in fulfillment efficiencies.

As a reminder, because we manage multiple levers across our P&L, we expect that transaction revenue as a percent of GTV may fluctuate from quarter to quarter. Advertising and other revenue was $297 million, up 16% year-over-year, outpacing GTV growth and driving our advertising and other investment rate to 2.9%, up from 2.8% in Q2 2025. This outperformance in Q2 was driven by broad-based strength across large, mid-market, and emerging brands, and was especially pronounced towards the end of the quarter alongside the World Cup. Total revenue was $1.04 billion, up 14% year-over-year, primarily driven by GTV growth. GAAP gross profit was $751 million, up 11% year-over-year, representing 7.3% of GTV compared to 7.5% in Q2 2025.

The year-over-year decrease in GAAP gross profit as a percent of GTV was primarily driven by an increase in cost of revenue, as payments to publishers has scaled as we expanded certain Carrot Ads and off-platform partnerships. As a reminder, we expect year-over-year growth in payments to publishers to moderate in 2026 compared to 2025. GAAP total operating expenses were $608 million, representing 5.9% of GTV compared to 6.1% of GTV in Q2 2025. Adjusted total operating expenses, which exclude the impact of stock-based compensation expense and certain other expenses, were $468 million and represented 4.5% of GTV compared to 4.8% of GTV in Q2 2025. The year-over-year improvement in both GAAP and adjusted total operating expenses reflects our continued focus on driving efficiencies while reinvesting in growth initiatives. GAAP net income was $111 million, down 4% year-over-year.

This was primarily driven by an increase in stock-based compensation, reflecting the year-over-year impact of shifting our first quarterly vesting date for our annual equity refresh grants from August to May. Adjusted EBITDA was $313 million, up 19% year-over-year. We also generated operating cash flow of $493 million, up 143% year-over-year, and free cash flow of $480 million, up 156% year-over-year, primarily driven by a large accounts receivable balance collected in Q2 2026, as well as higher receivables outstanding in the prior year period. In Q2, we repurchased $325 million of shares and ended the quarter with $998 million of remaining buyback capacity. We remain well on track to return the majority of free cash flow via repurchases this year and closed Q2 with $1 billion in cash and similar assets. On to our Q3 outlook.

I want to start with a few points to keep in mind when it comes to our updated GTV and adjusted EBITDA guidance philosophy. First, our guidance continues to reflect the most up-to-date data available at the time we report earnings. That hasn’t changed, and neither has how we run the business. Second, starting with our Q3 2026 outlook, we’ve widened our GTV and adjusted EBITDA guidance ranges to reflect our increased operating scale. Third, while we have beaten the high end of our guidance ranges in the past, going forward, we expect to land within the GTV and adjusted EBITDA guidance ranges we provide, with the midpoint being our best estimate of where we expect to land. With that in mind, for Q3 2026, we anticipate GTV of $10.3 billion-$10.55 billion, representing $10.425 billion and year-over-year growth of 14% at the midpoint.

We continue to expect GTV to outpace orders growth. We also anticipate adjusted EBITDA of $320 million-$340 million, representing $330 million and year-over-year growth of 19% at the midpoint. For advertising and other revenue, in Q3, we expect to grow 15%-18% year-over-year, once again outpacing our anticipated GTV growth and reflecting broad-based strength across our ads ecosystem. For the full year, we continue to expect adjusted EBITDA to grow faster than GTV year-over-year, while moderating its rate of expansion as we reinvest to accelerate across our multiple growth engines and lap some of the more significant operating expense efficiencies realized in 2024 and 2025. Overall, we delivered strong Q2 results and are building on the momentum as we enter Q3. Our operating fundamentals are strong, and we’re well-positioned to continue driving long-term profitable growth and shareholder value.

With that, we will open up the call for live questions. Operator, you may begin.

Operator, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. At this time, we will conduct the question and answer session. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. In the interest of time, we do kindly ask that you please limit yourself to one question at this time. Please stand by while we compile our Q&A roster. Our first question will come from Nikhil Devnani from Bernstein. Your line is open.

Nikhil Devnani, Analyst, Bernstein: Hi there. Thank you for taking the question. I wanted to ask about GTV growth. You grew about 14% in Q2, and at the upper end of your guidance ranges, it points to a little bit of acceleration potential for the business. Would love to just hear what you’re seeing in terms of the underlying drivers of this momentum. What’s getting better? As you step back, given we really seem to be at a moment for grocery e-commerce adoption, how durable do you think this general trend of acceleration and strength can be as you look out over a multi-quarter period? Thank you.

Chris Rogers, Chief Executive Officer, Instacart: Hi, Nikhil, it’s Chris. Thanks for the question. Let me unpack our growth drivers and the strength that we’re seeing, and that should help illustrate why I’m so confident in our ability to drive durable, profitable growth into the future. As I said in my opening statement, our business is performing incredibly well. We’ve meaningfully accelerated our growth over the past 3 quarters, including in Q2 with 14% GTV growth. We keep delivering quarter after quarter. We are executing very well. We’re seeing ongoing strength across marketplace and enterprise. What’s driving that is straightforward. We’re attracting more customers, and we’re giving them more reasons to come back to Instacart. Over the past 3 quarters, we’ve activated net new customers at our fastest year-over-year growth rate since 2022, and that’s helping us drive strong monthly customer growth while we’re continuing to also deepen customer engagement.

Our marketplace fundamentals are very strong. It’s clear that data is one of our biggest advantages, and we’re using that advantage to make our core grocery experience better every single quarter, whether that’s with order accuracy or with personalization, affordability, new agentic shopping experiences. AI is already helping to improve the customer experience. All of that innovation and technology extends to our enterprise platform, where retailers are choosing Instacart for our purpose-built grocery technology. As I mentioned, we launched Storefront Pro with Calgary Co-op. We launched Dierbergs. Aldi in the U.S. is already exceeding our expectations following the launch that we had last quarter. We’re signing more retailers for AI solutions, including Save Mart, Stew Leonard’s, Woodman’s, for Agentic Analytics and for our white label AI assistant.

When you take a step back, we are very pleased with the momentum that we’re seeing across the platform, and we believe that we’re positioned very well for Q3, where we’ve guided to 14% growth at the midpoint.

Operator, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Our next question will come from Eric Sheridan from Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Eric Sheridan, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Thanks so much for taking the question. Maybe coming back to your remarks on the enterprise, Chris, if you could just go a little bit deeper on how the enterprise offering is changing the nature of your relationship with the industry broadly, and what you think that means for both the supply side and growing a wide array of supply in the next couple years. How do you also think about the extension of the enterprise strategy leading more monetization from the industry as well? Thanks so much.

Chris Rogers, Chief Executive Officer, Instacart: Yeah, thanks, Eric. I’ll start with the enterprise strategy and what we’re building, then Emily can jump in on the margin side. Look, overall, we continue to believe enterprise is playing a highly strategic role for us with retailers and in our ability to deliver the best customer experience across multiple surfaces. There’s a few reasons why enterprise is such a differentiator for us. First of all, enterprise is enabling these much deeper retail relationships where we are truly partnering and innovating together with retailers, and we’re engaging in short- and long-term planning, and we’re developing joint roadmaps. These relationships are ultimately unlocking a far superior customer experience across their owned and operated websites as well as on our marketplace because of the collaboration and because of the depth of technical integrations that wouldn’t have existed otherwise.

For us, enterprise is driving overall efficiency across the platform. We’re able to extend our marketplace innovation to our enterprise clients, and that’s lowering our cost to serve because of the shared infrastructure. It’s also allowing us to reinvest back into shared technology that benefits both of us. Of course, the enterprise business comes with increased order volume and increased density, which also helps us on the cost side. Enterprise is a very exciting growth vector for us, but it’s also highly strategic, and it’s part of a bigger picture of what we’re building.

Emily Reuter, Chief Financial Officer, Instacart: Hey, Eric. Thanks for the question. As it relates to monetization of enterprise, I think the way we think about it is, we have a broad portfolio of products and services that really work together when it comes to our retailer relationship and then ultimately drive revenue and profit for us. On the GTV side, marketplace and enterprise businesses really reinforce each other. We’ve talked about this in the past, where marketplace technology extends to enterprise, which also enables us to scale fulfillment costs, which obviously benefits both sides of the ecosystem. You layer things like ads on top of that, and it scales across both sides of our business. As marketplace and enterprise grow, so does our ability to monetize through advertising.

The more services we add, like Carrot Ads, the more supply we create, and that creates more demand from the brands that we serve. That interdependence, I think, is really, really important to think about. Over the long term, we also talk about continuing to expand our portfolio of products, and that’s where you think about elements that Chris touched on earlier, like FoodStorm, expanding into the perimeter of retailers and AI solutions which is early, but starting to gain traction with a number of major retailers. Hopefully that gives a sense for how we think about long-term monetization of enterprise.

Operator, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Brian Pitts from BMO Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Brian Pitts, Analyst, BMO Capital Markets: Great. Thanks. You became Google’s first grocery partner for Gemini integration and AI mode shopping functionality. How should we think about the strategic and financial implications of this partnership, including customer acquisition, engagement, and potential monetization opportunities? Thanks.

Chris Rogers, Chief Executive Officer, Instacart: Yeah. Thanks, Brian. Look, our strategy when it comes to third-party platforms like Gemini is to be wherever customers want to shop while continuing to build the very best AI grocery experience directly on Instacart. It’s very early, what you’re citing with Gemini, but we view it as an incremental demand channel in a very large and under-penetrated category. We think that there’s potential for these types of integrations to grow the category over time. Then by co-creating the grocery experience with these partners, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini, we’re giving customers more ways to discover and shop on Instacart, which we believe can help accelerate this adoption over the short and long term. That’s how we’re thinking about the partnership.

It’s still very early days with all of these partnerships, and so there’s nothing kind of material to speak of in the short term, but we are thinking of them as demand generation channels in the short and long term.

Operator, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Colin Sebastian from Baird. Your line is open.

Colin Sebastian, Analyst, Baird: Thanks. Good afternoon. Chris, maybe a follow-up on enterprise. I’m curious if increasing digital competition in the grocery sector is having an impact on your pipeline there, and relatedly, how the international enterprise adoption is tracking against expectations. Emily, on the widened guidance range, just want to make sure I understand. Is that added conservatism? Is that higher variability or a shift in how you want the street to sort of interpret guidance? Thanks.

Chris Rogers, Chief Executive Officer, Instacart: Yeah. Thanks, Colin. On the first part, yes, I would say that increased digital-first competition is helping to rally retailers around North America and around the world to continue to invest in their own capabilities. I think at this point, e-commerce with a high-quality customer service element is table stakes for retailers, and it’s a complex thing to build on your own. Many retailers are turning to us, and that’s why you’re seeing so much traction. Internationally, I would say, I continue to be very encouraged by the opportunity to bring that same tech to retailers outside of North America. This is also still early days, but we do believe international represents an exciting long-term growth opportunity for us. On the one hand, we are very ambitious in our plans, and on the other hand, we are approaching that opportunity with quite a bit of discipline.

We’re leading with our enterprise suite. We are deploying products that have already been proven with retailers in North America. We’re not building net new, highly custom solutions for retailers in new markets. We’re deploying solutions like Storefront Pro and our Caper Carts and FoodStorm to address the challenges that are common across all grocery retailer, and that’s what gives us really high confidence that our tech is going to translate very well internationally as we move into those markets.

Emily Reuter, Chief Financial Officer, Instacart: Great. On the guidance range, thanks for the question. I think this one’s fairly straightforward. Our scale has increased very meaningfully since we went public. When we think about just the range on a percentage basis, and we look at our peers and sort of what’s normal in the market, I think we had sort of outgrown the range that we came public with several years ago. It was an opportunity to right-size the range relative to our current operating scale. At the same time we were widening the range, it was just an opportunity for us to revisit guidance philosophy, and that’s what you’re seeing in terms of the points I highlighted earlier, which is, while we’ve beaten the high end of the range in the past, going forward, our expectation is to land within the range with the midpoint as our best estimate.

Of course, as always, our guidance does reflect everything we’re seeing in the market to date, and try to give you our best understanding of how we think we can land the quarter.

Operator, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Jason Helfstein from Oppenheimer. Your line is open.

Jason Helfstein, Analyst, Oppenheimer: Thanks. Again, sorry to harp on enterprise, I think that’s something that we’re all pretty excited about. When you think about if enterprise revenue plus advertising, we put that as a bucket. Do we think over time, just because you haven’t quantified that within transactions, could that become the majority of the business? Ultimately, we kind of look at this as again, more of a platform play where I think initially people have looked at the business kind of more on the shopper side. Just second, any help with, Emily, how we could think of advertising as a percent of GTV next year? It’s been pretty consistent, could we actually start to see a breakout of the percent of GTV? Thanks.

Chris Rogers, Chief Executive Officer, Instacart: Thanks, Jason.

Emily Reuter, Chief Financial Officer, Instacart: Yeah

I’ll take the first part of the question, as it relates to enterprise and the percentage of business. Look, as we’ve said in the past, we operate both our marketplace and our enterprise as one fully integrated platform. Both marketplace and enterprise are growing. Both marketplace and enterprise are generating profit dollars for us. Importantly, as Emily said earlier, they reinforce each other in so many ways in terms of strength and key differentiators. Because of this, and because each retailer that sits on both marketplace and enterprise is unique in their offerings and the tools that they use from Instacart, we look at everything holistically. The success of our enterprise strategy is really showing up throughout our total company reported metrics. To give you a little bit more color on why these reinforce each other so strongly is there’s a very clear value loop.

Chris Rogers, Chief Executive Officer, Instacart: We take all of the technology that we’re building on marketplace, we put that in the hands of retailers with our enterprise offering, our deep enterprise relationships allow us to launch more services and integrations with retailers that benefit us back on marketplace. Having both marketplace and enterprise platforms allows us to reach more customers, and therefore we get the order benefit, the order density benefit, we get greater shopping efficiencies. You also touched on advertising. The advertising ecosystem allows CPGs to reach customers on both marketplace, where consumers are shopping, and on a retailer’s storefront. You can see how all of these pieces are highly intertwined. Every enhancement that we make on marketplace benefits enterprise, benefits ads, and vice versa. Because we manage this as one integrated portfolio, we are really able to balance investments.

We’re able to lean into the highest ROI opportunities and reinvest efficiencies back into the platform, all of which supports our commitment to drive overall growth and profitability progression.

Emily Reuter, Chief Financial Officer, Instacart: Yeah. On the ads question, I appreciate the question, recognizing, I think the strength of our ads and other business that we’ve been able to execute for the last several quarters. Really nice to see the acceleration in the business there and the broad-based strength that we’re seeing across large, midsize, and emerging brands. We’re feeling very good about what we’re seeing. We’re also really pleased to have guided to 15%-18% ads and other growth into Q3. A reflection of the continued underlying strength that we’re seeing there. As you know, we don’t guide to beyond the next quarter. What I can say is, of course, we have committed to long-term target ranges, and that implies continued ads and other growth that is higher than GTV growth over time. Now, it’s not necessarily always linear. We’ve talked about that.

There can be puts and takes over the short term. Our expectation and ambition is to grow ads and other faster than GTV. We’re seeing a lot of the results of the strategy that we’ve talked about over time in terms of the platform strategy extending beyond marketplace, growing our advertiser base, increasing our performance, enhancing our measurement, all of that really working incredibly well together.

Operator, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Our next question will come from Deepak Mathivanan from Cantor Fitzgerald. Your line is open.

Deepak Mathivanan, Analyst, Cantor Fitzgerald: Great. Thanks for taking the question. Of course, can you talk about the adoption of AI shopping assistant? You talked about some use cases. How are you driving customers to use the experience and customers to try the assistant? What type of benefits are you seeing on the KPIs? Emily, AOV have now basically reached a level where it was before you launched restaurants on the platform and also the small basket orders. Can you give some color on what the underlying trends on AOV is? That’d be helpful. Thanks so much.

Chris Rogers, Chief Executive Officer, Instacart: Thanks, Deepak. Yeah, absolutely happy to talk about our AI assistant. We’ve been very pleased with the pilot. As a result, as I mentioned, we plan to launch our AI assistant across North America over the next several weeks. Look, we strongly believe that the success we’re seeing is all driven by our data advantage and what we’ve been able to create as a result. Our AI assistant doesn’t just recommend generic recipes or generic pairings. It understands a customer’s preference. It understands their recent purchase history, what’s actually available at a nearby store, and current promotions, and it turns all of that into an order that’s ready to be placed and delivered in an hour.

That’s built, again, on our rich data, 1.6 billion lifetime orders, 2 billion item product catalog, and a shopper network that’s in the physical stores giving us real-time signals of what’s on the shelf. That combination is what’s really differentiating the AI assistant that we’ve built. From a customer engagement perspective, we’re seeing customers are using it to build their weekly carts. They’re using it to discover new products, and they’re increasingly using it to plan meals. For example, customers, we can see them use a prompt like, "Plan four weeknight dinners that my kids will eat under $150." It will build a real shoppable cart using in-stock items at the customer’s favorite retailer.

It could say, "Rebuild last week’s order, but swap in something for taco night." The results will combine their purchase history, we’ll introduce fresh, new discovery ideas for that meal. An interesting data point that we want to highlight is that orders placed with our AI assistant are, on average, larger than our typical basket, which is notable because our basket is $115 AOV, which is already industry-leading. What I’ll say is we’re very happy with how this is progressing. We feel like we’re very well positioned to deliver a very high-quality agentic experience for our customers.

Emily Reuter, Chief Financial Officer, Instacart: Yeah, on AOV, first of all, I think

Chris Rogers, Chief Executive Officer, Instacart: It’s important to just acknowledge the strength of AOV, right? It’s always been true for us that we have very high AOVs, and that really reflects our strategy, which is that we’re serving the full weekly shop use case. That’s really differentiated versus others in the market that tend to serve more of a fill-in use case. I think that’s just remained true over time. In terms of the AOV strength that we’re seeing, obviously, when we had introduced restaurants and $10 minimum back over the last two years, we did call that out as a short-term headwind to AOV. Of course, we’ve lapped the headwind, when you look into what are the drivers of AOV strength today, there’s a couple of things going on. One is deepening engagement with customers. As customers spend more time on Instacart, they spend more over time.

That’s what we’re seeing and continuing to see. We’ve also called out in the past and continue to see outperformance from club retailers. Those tend to have larger AOVs overall, and we do particularly well there. The other thing I would note is we do have growth from our high AOV business customers, including some of the more recent launches over the last year, like Restaurant Depot, that we’ve talked about over the last couple of quarters. We’re really seeing strength from coming back to the core of what we do, which is ultimately meeting more of our customers’ grocery needs.

Operator, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Our next question will come from Josh Beck from Raymond James. Your line is open.

Josh Beck, Analyst, Raymond James: Thank you for taking the question. I wanted to go back to the Cart Assistant learning. Certainly sounds like basket size has been an early standout. I’m curious, maybe you need more data to see this, but how are you thinking about maybe frequency and conversion? It does seem like some of these shopping experiences can really get collapsed. I’m curious on how you’re thinking about that. With respect to advertising within the Assistant experience, or the way that I read the blog was there’s not necessarily a lot of ads at the moment, but you’re experimenting with a lot of different formats, whether it’s sponsored recipes or a few different elements. How do you think maybe just about the ad monetization for the Cart Assistant versus the maybe kind of non-Assistant experience? Thank you.

Chris Rogers, Chief Executive Officer, Instacart: Thanks, Josh. Look, I’ll start on kind of the metrics that we’re seeing, but first, I’ll back up a little bit. We do believe that AI is going to be a meaningful growth driver for us and for the category, but over time. Remember, grocery shopping is uniquely complex compared to most other verticals, and it’s time-consuming, and it’s deeply personal, and it’s shaped by individual dietary needs. Our AI assistant delivers an agentic experience that’s intended to remove that friction, and it’s making shopping more personalized and intuitive, whether customers are reordering staples or they’re planning their family meals for the week. Again, we have a real advantage here because of our data and retailer integrations.

We have the proprietary data from our 1.6 billion orders, but also from our at-scale fulfillment network. Our enterprise platform helps as well with the deep retailer integrations, which strengthens all of it, and all of that combination is what’s allowing us to move from kind of a front-end AI experience to actually completing the order, and that’s very difficult to do at scale. I do think that our AI is going to be a durable growth driver for online grocery. We expect agentic experiences to accelerate online adoption. From a metric perspective, I do expect it’s going to drive better conversion. I think it’s going to drive higher retention and larger baskets and more frequent ordering, but again, over time. On the second question on ads, look, we’re heavily embracing AI kind of throughout our ads offering.

It is completely core to our advertising innovation at this point, as a result we’ve rolled out several AI-powered features and tools for advertisers that are increasingly driving better results for brands while also improving the customer experience. We believe with AI, we can do both together. I’ll give you a couple examples. We’ve rolled out AI-powered recommendations for all advertisers and Ads Manager, which can automatically identify ways to improve campaign performance. For example, we recommend campaign settings as well as flags for products with missing images, which also helps on the Instacart consumer experience as well. We make brand hierarchy suggestions that unlock more accurate brand-level reporting and recommendations that target ROAS optimization. We make recommendations on how to increase new-to-brand coverage. Earlier this year, we also launched our new generative recommendations model that uses real-time context to better understand a consumer’s intent.

For example, previously, adding milk to your cart might result in a recommendation to add cookies or cereal or sliced cheese. Now, based on additional items in your cart, like flour and eggs, we know that you’re probably shopping for a baking occasion. That tends to add more valuable suggestions like vanilla or cinnamon, which leads to higher engagement and ultimately better results for advertising. The final thing I want to highlight is we continue to use sophisticated machine learning to drive specific results for advertisers, such as we began testing this Grow objective, which is helping brands increase repeat purchase from existing customers, which improves lifetime value. We’re also expanding our Acquire objective to display ads, which helps brands reach more new-to-brand customers. We’re using AI throughout the entire ads experience.

We’re going to keep investing here, and we expect AI to remain kind of a durable source of our advertising innovation going forward.

Operator, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Our next question will come from Shweta Khajuria from Wolfe Research. Your line is open.

Shweta Khajuria, Analyst, Wolfe Research: Thanks a lot for taking my questions. Let me try two, please. First is on enterprise and international markets. Could you please talk about how international markets and your conversations there are different as you try and expand enterprise in those regions versus what you’ve seen here in the U.S. and to the degree, the level of investment that you may need now that you have spent maybe a little bit more time over the past few quarters? Then the second one is on price parity. Where are you with price parity today versus perhaps some of your competitors, and is that going to be a differentiating factor as we think about it over the next, call it, three to six quarters? Is that going to be an expectation? Thank you.

Chris Rogers, Chief Executive Officer, Instacart: Thanks for the question. I’ll start with international. When we’re in international markets talking about our technology, the conversations are surprisingly very similar to the conversations that we’re having in North America because they’re trying to solve all of the same problems. How do you scale an e-commerce platform? How do you fulfill at scale? How do you have really rich sources of recommendations and suggestions? How do you manage cart and checkout? Retailers are looking for an end-to-end experience that just works together, and what we’re finding is that the solutions that we’ve been building for years in North America are highly applicable to retailers around the world.

I would also like to point out that we made an acquisition with Instaleap, which is giving us more reach in these international markets and has solved some problems for retailers that are perhaps a little bit more unique to international markets, like serving multiple marketplaces with fulfillment technology. We’ve been leaning into continuing to expand those conversations that we’re having with retailers. I will say we are already seeing positive signals. Our Storefront Pro launches with Costco in France and Spain have continued to perform ahead of our expectations, reinforcing our confidence in the overall strategy. Again, we’re in early stages, but we like the progress that we’re seeing, and we do believe that our enterprise first approach is going to set us up well to expand there over time. On your second question, which was on price parity.

First of all, I want to be very clear. Retailers are setting item-level prices on our marketplace and on their owned and operated sites that we power. Some retailers choose to mark up prices to help offset the fees that we charge, and some may choose not to mark up the prices. That said, what we’re seeing is that customers are seeking value, and they’re gravitating towards retailers who do not mark up. As a result, we’re seeing these retailers consistently grow faster and retain customers better on our platform over time. The data that we shared on this in the past is clear. Non-markup retailers grow more than 10 points faster on average, and they retain better.

Therefore, we think eliminating markups is a very clear mechanism for retailers to drive incremental sales, especially as they’re competing against other retailers for share of sales, including large digital-first retailers who they’re competing against. Our approach has been that we’re working very closely with our retail partners to ensure that they understand the data and they understand the insights and the business case for them. To be clear, the cost to move to non-markup is theirs to bear, so it’s a business decision for the retailers. I will point out that, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, we have more retailers that do not mark up relative to other third-party marketplaces, and so we’re already a leader in this space.

Operator, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Our next question will come from Andrew Boone from Citizens. Your line is open.

Andrew Boone, Analyst, Citizens: Thanks so much for taking the questions. Chris, I wanted to go back to the fastest new customer adds that you guys have seen, sounds like year to date. Can you just unpack that? What’s different that you guys are doing now, or is there something else where you guys are converting better? Just help us understand that. The Arpalus, sorry if I’m mispronouncing that, acquisition that you guys made. Can you help us understand the benefit of having better in-store data? That seems like something you guys have always had. This feels like a step function unlock. What does that do for you guys? Or what else can you guys really unlock, whether that’s monetization or operations from that? Thank you so much.

Chris Rogers, Chief Executive Officer, Instacart: Thank you for the question. I will start with the new customer acquisition. Look, my perspective is that this is all a result of us prioritizing all of the right things internally, the things that we know really matter to customers. We’re giving the customer more personalization so that they feel like we really know them when they come to Instacart, and we can anticipate their needs. That’s including things like health and nutrition tags that really matter to consumers. As part of that, we’re giving them an incredible agentic experience, one that understands the customer’s intent for their shopping trip and helps drive discovery and helps them build their basket and plan their meals. We’re also constantly delivering higher order quality, building on the 16 consecutive quarters of improvement of both found rate and perfect order fill rate.

We’re helping to earn customers’ trust by delivering a higher quality experience quarter after quarter. We’re also prioritizing affordability, which we know is deeply important to families. We’re helping to bring their costs down with very important initiatives like loyalty programs and weekly deals, and as I just spoke about, by working with retailers to bring down their markups. When it comes to innovation and where we’re investing and the things that we’re working on internally, we’re not standing still at all. Combining that with the fact that we’re already a category leader and the category is dramatically under-penetrated, it gives me the confidence in our path forward and our ability to attract customers to our platform. On your second question, which I believe was Arpalus. Look, I think first of all, Arpalus is a great example of our M&A philosophy in action.

We look for technologies and capabilities that complement our existing platform and strategy and accelerate our growth in a disciplined way. In this case, acquiring Arpalus directly supports one of our biggest priorities, which is delivering the highest quality grocery experience. Quality is already a key differentiator for Instacart, as I just mentioned. Now with Arpalus’ computer vision technology, it’s going to complement all the investments that we’re making, then we’re going to put it in the hands of our more than 600,000 shoppers, and we’re going to have better tools to identify products on the actual shelf, that will help us improve things like our fulfillment accuracy. I expect Arpalus is going to help us drive fulfillment efficiency. I think it’s going to enable us to provide more relevant AI-powered shopping experiences for consumers.

I think it’s going to help us further strengthen our inventory intelligence, that’s all very important for our platform and the experience that we deliver to customers.

Operator, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Bernie McTernan from Needham & Company. Your line is open.

Bernie McTernan, Analyst, Needham & Company: Great. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. I was wondering if you could just shed some light on the Instaleap partnership in the U.K. It sounded like there was some picking and maybe delivery aspect to the partnership, which I think would be a major unlock. I just wanted to see if that’s a blueprint that you can bring to other markets to unlock that problem or the difficulty with the enterprise offering. Thank you.

Chris Rogers, Chief Executive Officer, Instacart: Yeah, it is a great question. Thank you, Bernie. Yes, look, we are very excited about the Instaleap U.K. partnership with Morrisons. It is picking technology. It is slightly different capabilities than what we have in our first-party offering with Instacart. It allows us to orchestrate deliveries across multiple platforms, which is something that Morrisons was looking for. It is very strong and powerful picking technology for the retailer. Honestly, we increasingly think that this is going to be something that we are going to be able to scale in more markets. We continue to be very excited about the Instaleap acquisition. Not only is it helping us expand our global footprint because they have so many retailers that they are already working with, what we are seeing now is that the technology is resonating with retailers that they weren’t working with in the past.

That gives us extra excitement about the acquisition of Instaleap.

Operator, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Michael Morton from MoffettNathanson. Your line is open.

Michael Morton, Analyst, MoffettNathanson: Hi. Good evening. Thank you for the question. I was wondering if we could get an update on the breakdown of priority orders. In the past, you have talked about on-demand and also the orders that are a 30-minute window. Just we keep hearing about consumers’ continual demand to increase delivery speed, and it seems to be an area in grocery that plays to your advantage. While we are talking about things that play to your advantage, the Amazon inroads in grocery are no secret, but the SKU offering is limited by their first-party business model. Could you share any data from what you see your average shoppers kind of long-tail distribution of inventory needs? Like everybody has their own dietary kind of restrictions in a household.

Just a better understanding of why a consumer needs 40,000 options that is presented from a marketplace grocery versus a first-party offering like an Amazon. Thank you.

Emily Reuter, Chief Financial Officer, Instacart: Sure. I’ll start with your question on priority orders. We haven’t updated the specific %, and part of that is just these are decisions we’re making around what is the optimal overall marketplace balance. You’ve seen us over time adjust pricing on priority as an example, because, at one point, I think priority was probably higher than where we thought was the appropriate levels or healthy for the ecosystem, right? You’re trying to balance all the parts of the marketplace. And so there’s not necessarily sort of an up and to the right, we’re trying to get priority to 100% because that would sort of, by definition, undermine the product itself. We’re constantly working on speed. We think that’s a core value prop, but I’ll get back to selection. It’s speed and selection, right, and quality, and all these things need to work together.

Our standard ETAs have also improved alongside priority. It’s sort of a composition of these things. I don’t think it’s sort of priority has to be at X% for us to be successful. I think there’s a happy equilibrium that we’re constantly looking to make. I think as it relates to your question, though, on selection, as I just said, it’s this combination of speed, but the ability to execute an order in the timeframe customers want, which we know is immediate, but have everything they’re looking for, right?

There may be some use cases where you’re happy to choose from a small selection of SKUs, but there’s a reason why you go into most grocery stores in the U.S. and you see every variety of dairy under the sun, and that’s because people have very strong opinions and perspectives about, as you said, their nutritional needs, their dietary restrictions, allergies, just brand preferences, frankly. We see that in our data, right? On average, our customers over their lifetime shop at more than five retailers, and Instacart+ at more than double that. I think that’s reflective of a desire for the full inventory of options that we have in a marketplace ecosystem.

We just see it sort of time and again, selection drives demand, and it drives demand when you’re able to serve it in a timeframe that meets customers’ needs, which, time and again, we see as now or as soon as possible thereafter.

Operator, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Yigal Aronovich from Wedbush. Your line is open.

Yigal Aronovich, Analyst, Wedbush: Hey, good afternoon, guys. Just wanted to ask on what you’re seeing outside of the core grocery, so within restaurants, retail, express. What are the trends you’re seeing there? Given the M&A, you made some comments on it, on the strategy there. Any more color on the approach and capital allocation? How important does it remain here? You have a few things to digest. How much more could we expect there? Thanks.

Chris Rogers, Chief Executive Officer, Instacart: Thanks for the question. I can start with restaurants. Our thesis for adding restaurants to our platform has played out very well. By adding an additional high-frequency use case to our platform, we’ve been able to drive stronger grocery engagement. Simply said, customers who have ordered from restaurants have ordered more groceries. That strategy, it’s successful for us because it layers on top of our strong marketplace foundation, which means that we’re able to optimize our marketing and our engagement strategies to drive customers to the best use case at any given time. At times, customers are going to want a different use case, whether that’s grocery or, to your point, other retail categories and restaurants, and we’re able to cater our marketing and engagement strategies accordingly to drive the best durable long-term engagement.

Put together, we’re seeing our entire platform deliver incredibly strong results. We drive monthly customer growth while we continue to deepen consumer engagement because we’re able to optimize through grocery, through other retail, and through experiences, use cases like restaurants. On your second question on capital allocation, our capital allocation framework has been very consistent. We invest in the business first. We maintain firepower for M&A. We opportunistically repurchase shares. On M&A, you’ve now seen our M&A strategy in action. Our recent acquisitions are similar to what we’ve done in the past, which is to buy technology that makes sense to buy versus build and accelerate our time to market. Instaleap is a great example. Arpalus, our newest acquisition, is another great example, our real-time inventory intelligence. On buyback specifically, I’ll pass to Emily to speak to.

Emily Reuter, Chief Financial Officer, Instacart: Sure. We’ve continued our buyback strategy consistent with what we’ve shared in the past. In Q2, we repurchased $325 million of shares. That really reflects our continued confidence in the business, which hopefully you saw reflected in our results today. We are well on track, as we’ve previously committed to return the majority of free cash flow via repurchases this year. We did end the quarter with just about $1 billion of remaining buyback capacity. I expect buyback to continue to be an important part of our overall capital allocation strategy.

Operator, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. We will take our last question for today from Ron Josey from Citi. Your line is open.

Ron Josey, Analyst, Citi: Great. Thanks for sneaking me in here. I wanted to ask two questions. One is just sort of to better understand the demand side. Emily, I think club has been a driver of AOV for several quarters now. I just want to understand that a little bit more in terms of why. Chris, on the data side, maybe asking you a little bit differently than what we’ve been asked before, but the 2 billion products, the tens of millions of inventory signals that Instacart gets today. Would love to hear how your grocer partners think of Instacart from a differentiation perspective relative to the others that are out there, just given your size and scale. Question is on the data advantage and how your grocery partners view that. Thank you.

Emily Reuter, Chief Financial Officer, Instacart: Great. I can kick off on the demand side. The question, I think, specifically, was around AOV strength being driven by club in particular and why. I think there’s a couple of different things going on here. One, there is some macro component here, but I would maybe frame it more as consumers seeking value, right? We know that club retailers, and you see this in the performance of club retailers broadly in the ecosystem, not just in online, are performing really well. Customers are looking for value, and online or offline, but in our case, both on our marketplace, but also on our third-party SFP sites, we’re seeing a lot of strength within the club ecosystem. On the second piece of it, specific to Costco, and we’ve talked about Costco, the strong relationship we have there.

We did launch a benefit with their executive members coming up on a year ago, that’s been really successful. That’s driven some of the strength there as well. That’s just continuing to deepen the relationship with Costco, but also with folks that are looking for that additional value. Overall, those are a couple of the things that we’re seeing. Then generally, why is club higher AOV? I think it’s just the nature of what club retailers are selling, the size of the products, and the scale of that. Yeah, continuing to see strength there.

Chris Rogers, Chief Executive Officer, Instacart: On your second question, look, retailers think of us completely differently, that’s because we’re playing a fundamentally different game here. No one else is doing what we’re doing, where we’re taking all of the innovation that we’re building on marketplace and the hundreds of millions of orders that we’re performing there. We’re taking our learning and our scale, and we’re giving it to retailers in the form of enterprise technology. Now, in hundreds of cases, we’re also powering their e-commerce. We’re also powering their fulfillment. 310 retailers, we’re powering their ads tech stack, and oftentimes extending ad demand directly onto their websites. We’ve now forayed into AI solutions with our white labeling the AI assistant that we’ve built.

We’re building AI analytic solutions for our retailers, it’s a very holistic partnership that allows us to be very deeply partnered with retailers, plan for the short and long term, and innovate on both the marketplace and on their owned and operated website. My point of view is that they think of us completely differently than other third-party marketplaces, restaurant delivery marketplaces.

Operator, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. This does conclude today’s program. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect. Everyone, have a wonderful day.