Instacart (CART) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

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DATE

Thursday, Feb. 12, 2026, at 5 p.m. ET

CALL PARTICIPANTS

• Chief Executive Officer — Chris Rogers
• Chief Financial Officer — Emily Reuter
• Head of Investor Relations — Rebecca Yoshiyama
• Chief Operating Officer — Asha Sharma

TAKEAWAYS

• GTV -- $9.85 billion, representing 14% year-over-year growth, cited as the company's strongest increase in three years.
• Orders -- 89.5 million in the quarter, up 16% year over year, with the average order value down 1% due to higher restaurant order mix.
• Transaction Revenue -- Grew 13% year over year, equaling 7.1% of GTV and remaining flat as a percentage compared with the prior year.
• Advertising and Other Revenue -- Up 10% year over year, supported by the onboarding of additional Carrot Ads partners and greater brand diversification.
• Carrot Ads Partners -- Expanded coverage to over 310 retailer-owned sites from 220 the prior year.
• Advertisers -- More than 9,000 brands advertised on Instacart (Maplebear Inc.) in the quarter, compared with 7,000 a year ago.
• GAAP Net Income -- $81 million, a 46% decrease year over year primarily driven by nonrecurring legal and regulatory costs, including a $60 million FTC settlement.
• Adjustments to Earnings -- Adjusted EBITDA rose 20% year over year to $303 million; operating cash flow rose 20% to $184 million.
• Share Repurchases -- $1.1 billion repurchased in the quarter, and $1.4 billion total for the year, with $250 million via an accelerated program.
• Ending Cash & Equivalents -- Approximately $1 billion remaining, with $671 million left in authorized buyback capacity.
• Marketplace Coverage -- Platform now hosts over 2,200 retail banners across nearly 100,000 locations.
• Enterprise Platform -- Instacart (Maplebear Inc.) now powers more than 380 grocer e-commerce sites, including international expansion through Costco launches in Spain and France.
• Lifetime Orders -- Surpassed 1.6 billion fulfilled since inception.
• Instacart+ Contribution -- Paid Instacart+ members represent the majority of GTV and orders, with continued member growth and higher engagement and retention rates than nonmembers.
• AI Impact -- Average output per engineer rose nearly 40% in the last year, with 10% of the team increasing output by 80%; AI enables up to 4x faster project delivery for new initiatives.
• Q1 2026 Outlook -- GTV guided to $10.125 billion–$10.275 billion, equating to 11%–13% year-over-year growth; advertising and other revenue growth expected at 11%–14% and adjusted EBITDA at $280 million–$290 million.

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RISKS

• GAAP Net Income Decline -- GAAP net income dropped 46% year over year because of "higher G&A expenses related to nonrecurring legal and regulatory matters, Operator: including a $60,000,000 settlement with the FTC."
• Adjusted EBITDA Expansion Moderation -- Management stated, "we expect this rate of expansion to moderate year over year as we reinvest to accelerate across our multiple growth engines," indicating the pace of adjusted EBITDA growth may slow in 2026 due to increased reinvestment and lapsing cost efficiencies seen in 2024 and 2025.

SUMMARY

Maplebear (NASDAQ:CART) delivered record GTV and order growth rates, citing strategic platform expansion and further international launches with key partners. Management noted that advertising revenue diversification, platform scaling, and increased efficiencies from AI have driven improvements across their marketplace, enterprise, and ads businesses. The company also highlighted a historically large buyback and expressed confidence in sustaining profitability while guiding for continued double-digit top-line growth into the next quarter.

• The transition to an annual shareholder letter was announced, while quarterly calls and disclosures will continue, shifting longer-term communication strategy.
• Management identified enterprise solutions, with deeper technical integrations and custom partnerships, as an increasingly important growth lever for both domestic and European markets.
• AI-related innovations are impacting both engineering productivity and new feature rollouts, such as Cart Assistant and agentic shopping experiences, with initial beta testing and broader rollout planned by the end of Q1.
• Leadership reported that paid Instacart+ members now drive the majority of volume and transactions, reinforcing premium user engagement as a durable revenue base.
• The call emphasized that the addition of large retailers to competing marketplaces has not materially impacted order volume or growth trajectory, according to current internal data and strategic framing.
• Cost of revenue increased due to rising payments to publishers from off-platform advertising activities and Carrot Ads, though management expects the pace of this growth to moderate in the next year.

INDUSTRY GLOSSARY

• GTV: Gross Transaction Value, the total value of goods sold through the platform before deducting refunds, returns, or cancellations.
• Carrot Ads: Instacart (Maplebear)'s ad platform enables brands to serve digital advertisements both on Instacart's marketplace and via partner grocers’ online storefronts.
• Storefront Pro: The enterprise solution suite for grocers to launch, manage, and monetize branded e-commerce sites powered by Instacart (Maplebear Inc.) technology.
• CaperCart: Smart shopping carts providing in-store, digitized customer experiences and enabling retail media placement within physical stores.
• Agentic Shopping: AI-driven, personalized shopping experiences and workflows, including chat-based and automated cart planning, enabled by proprietary technology and first-party data.

Full Conference Call Transcript

Rebecca Yoshiyama: On the call with me today are Chris Rogers, our Chief Executive Officer, and Emily Reuter, our Chief Financial Officer. Before we dive in, I want to provide an update on our approach to earnings communication. Beginning with Q1 2026, we will not publish a quarterly shareholder letter, and instead, we will move to an annual shareholder letter. We believe this approach allows us to better reflect the long-term nature of our strategy, step back to assess our progress more holistically, and focus on the sustained value we are building. We plan to continue to provide regular updates through our quarterly earnings call, a detailed earnings press release, and supplemental materials. Now on to 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. 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 last Form 10-Q. We assume no obligation to update these statements after today's call except as required by law. In addition, we will 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 shareholder letter, which can be found on our Investor Relations website. Now I will turn the call over to Chris for his opening remarks.

Chris Rogers: Thanks, Rebecca. Hello, everyone. I hope you have all had a chance to read my annual shareholder letter. I am incredibly proud of what we delivered in Q4. We closed out the year with our strongest GTV growth in three years, Ads and other revenue grew 10% year over year, and based on our strong conviction in how the business is performing, we repurchased $1,100,000,000 worth of shares in Q4 alone. Looking ahead in Q1, we are guiding to the strongest year-over-year GTV growth we have ever provided as a public company. We are doing it while continuing to expand profitability.

The performance gives us confidence not just in the quarter ahead, but in our ability to drive durable profitable growth over the long term. It is clear that we have real momentum, and today, I want to focus on what is driving it. It starts with the category that we operate in. Grocery is massive, still early in its online journey, highly fragmented, and one of the most operationally complex categories in all of retail. These dynamics have historically slowed online adoption, but they are also exactly why our differentiation matters and why we are continuing to extend our lead.

Because we stayed relentlessly focused on grocery, we have purpose-built technology, deep retailer integrations, and ongoing systems designed specifically to handle that complexity at scale. Just as important, these systems work together, so our advantages compound with every order we fulfill, which is now up to more than 1,600,000,000 lifetime orders. That is why, as I said in the letter, we are now in a position to press our advantage.

Our strategy is clear. Be the platform consumers trust for all of their grocery needs, provide the technology grocers rely on to power their omnichannel business, and be the advertising ecosystem brands prefer on Instacart and across many other services. And with generative AI accelerating execution across our platform, we are increasing our velocity, compounding our advantages, and driving greater efficiency, all while strengthening the value of our first-party data. Our momentum is showing up across multiple engines for growth. Starting with Marketplace. Today, more than 2,200 retail banners spanning nearly 100,000 locations are accessible on the Instacart app or instacart.com. As we have expanded selection, we continue to raise the bar on convenience, quality, and affordability.

And because our marketplace fundamentals are strong, we are able to reinvest in marketing and incentives efficiently, driving even more growth and operating leverage. Enterprise is our next growth engine. Enterprise is not just another channel for us. It is how we build deeper, more durable partnerships with retailers. This includes custom integrations, shared planning and road maps, joint OKRs, so that we are aligned on what success looks like with real mutual upside. And today, we now power more than 380 grocer e-commerce sites, and we see a lot of runway ahead both to launch with new partners, and to expand with existing partners as they adopt more of our solutions.

Costco is a great example of how this progression works. We started with our marketplace and storefront experience, building trust and driving growth, and from there, we upgraded Costco to Storefront Pro and expanded to Costco Business Centers and launched additional fulfillment options like priority delivery. More recently, we worked together to launch a benefit for Costco executive members, who are their most valuable customer segment, and we expanded internationally with the launch of Costco's first ever same-day site in France and Spain.

Sprouts is another strong example. We began by launching e-commerce on our marketplace by building a storefront on sprouts.com. From there, we expanded fulfillment with curbside pickup. We put our picking technology directly in the hands of Sprouts associates. As the partnership deepens, Sprouts upgraded to Storefront Pro with Carrot Ads, unlocking new incremental revenue streams. Today, we are leaning in even further together with in-store experiences like Caper and FoodStorm. We are now getting ready to launch AI solutions starting with Cart Assistant. And these examples are not isolated cases. We see this again and again. Partnerships start with e-commerce capabilities. They expand through fulfillment and ad monetization. And they deepen with in-store and AI capabilities over time.

Each step helps retailers accelerate growth and allows us to participate in that growth as well. In addition, enterprise unlocks system-wide value for us. In the same way that marketplace learning drives enterprise innovation, enterprise also makes our entire platform better. We can start with whatever our retailer needs, and we can build from there. And as our partnership deepens, consumers get a better experience. They engage more. They place more orders. And that scale lowers our cost to serve and improves efficiency across marketplace and enterprise, allowing us to invest even more in the shared technology that powers the entire platform.

This is why our enterprise platform is a growth engine and why I am so confident that we have multiple years of profitable growth ahead of us.

Our growth and momentum across Marketplace and Enterprise also strengthens another part of our business, our ads ecosystem and our data solutions. Brands and agencies want strong performance, and they want measurements that they can trust at scale. And that is exactly what we deliver. In addition to ads on Marketplace, we have expanded our advertising technology and demand to more than 310 retailer-owned sites through Carrot Ads, up from 220 a year ago. As our reach has grown, we have pulled in more demand. In Q4, more than 9,000 brands advertised on Instacart, up from 7,000 last year. And this diversification makes our ads ecosystem stronger and more resilient.

We are also starting to unlock advertising inside physical stores through shoppable display ads on CaperCarts. Early engagement has been encouraging. For example, a simple “Got everything you need?” prompt is driving a nearly one percentage point lift in basket size on average. And this is just one data point that reinforces our belief that Caper will be one of the most powerful in-store advertising platforms over time. We are also investing in incremental advertising and other revenue opportunities built on our first-party data. For example, with our off-platform partnerships, where we can help brands reach consumers beyond Instacart, whether that is through search, social, recipe, or video.

In many cases, we connect that activity back to real purchases on our platform. We are also creating additional ways to monetize our data, including with the consumer insights portal, which now has a dozen paid subscribers in just a few months.

Finally, I want to spend a few minutes on AI because it is no longer just about making teams faster or more productive. We are seeing fundamental shifts in how work gets done and how platforms create advantage. AI shifts may pose a risk to certain businesses, but we believe these shifts favor platforms like Instacart (Maplebear Inc.) that combine technology with real-world operations and unique data at scale. This is where we win and why we think we will excel and be a net gainer in an AI-driven world. Grocery is not a digital-only problem. It is physical. It is operational. It is relationship driven.

We operate at that intersection with deep retailer integrations, an experienced shopper network, and a constant presence inside stores. That operating model gives us one of the richest grocery data sets in the world. For example, our orders on average include at least one replacement. That means we do not just understand what people buy, we know what they intended to buy and what is acceptable when that item is not available. And those insights can only be earned by having a network of shoppers inside stores solving real-world inventory problems at scale. Put simply, our physical operations make our data better. That data makes our technology smarter, more unique, and more effective.

That is exactly what is required to succeed in a category as complex as grocery. And it underscores why we win as the leading grocery technology partner for the industry.

Internally, we are also leveraging AI to accelerate our execution. Over the last year, we invested heavily in connecting our tools, data, and infrastructure so AI can operate across our systems, not in silos. As a result, our teams are using AI not just to move faster on a single workflow, but to solve broader problems and execute across multiple initiatives in parallel. You can see the impact in how we are executing. Over the past year, average output per engineer is up nearly 40%, which includes 10% of our team increasing output by 80%. This momentum is already accelerating into 2026.

And for new projects, we believe AI is now enabling us to build production-grade software more than four times faster than before. And we are doing all of this while improving quality. System reliability is up, even as engineering throughput has increased significantly. That is not incremental improvement. It is a fundamentally different pace of execution, and it is fueling momentum across our business. For example, on our enterprise platform, we are onboarding more retailers faster while delivering more customized white-glove solutions at scale, which was not possible before.

You can also see it in the breadth of what we are delivering, from improvements in quality and fulfillment efficiency, to new customer experiences like our SmartShot technology, to our white label AI assistant known as Cart Assistant, to building physical AI capabilities in store with CaperCard and StoreView, and to expanding retailers' e-commerce capabilities internationally. And then on ads, AI is powering more relevant consumer interactions and simpler, more efficient tools for advertisers. It is fair to say that we are using AI across the board to accelerate and improve all aspects of our business.

Overall, 2025 was a defining year for Instacart (Maplebear Inc.). More than 26,000,000 customers trusted Instacart, and engagement continued to deepen with approximately 10,000,000 customers placing at least one order in December alone, a new high for the company. That is a clear signal that our strategy is working, our operating fundamentals are strong, our teams are executing at a high level across our growth engines, we are well positioned to be the clear winner with AI. And as we look ahead to 2026, my mindset is clear. This is the moment for us to accelerate. It is time to press our advantage, extend our lead, further scale our platform, and unlock new opportunities to drive long-term profitable growth.

We are still early in the omnichannel transformation of grocery. Instacart (Maplebear Inc.) has earned the right to lead it, and I am determined to make that happen. With that, I will turn it over to Emily to walk through the financials.

Emily Reuter: Thank you, Chris, and hello, everyone. Our business is operating with tremendous momentum across multiple growth engines, powered by a strong operating foundation and Instacart (Maplebear Inc.)'s distinct advantages. That foundation and the large underpenetrated market ahead of us is exactly why we are continuing to invest across a balanced portfolio of short, medium, and long-term growth initiatives to extend our category leadership. We are doing this with discipline, guided by clear guardrails, return expectations, and deliberate trade-offs across investments. And we continue to drive efficiency and leverage across the P&L. We have been consistent with this approach, and it is working. Over the past few years, we have accelerated GTV growth while expanding adjusted EBITDA. That track record gives us confidence in our strategy and our ability to deliver even more growth over the long term. So let us dive into our Q4 results. We ended the year with momentum. GTV was $9,850,000,000, up 14% year over year, marking our strongest growth in three years.

This performance was driven by orders reaching 89,500,000, up 16% year over year, and as we expected, average order value decreasing by 1% year over year, reflecting growth in restaurant orders. Transaction revenue grew 13% year over year and represented 7.1% of GTV, which was flat year over year. This was driven by investments into affordability to drive customer engagement, largely offset by increased fulfillment efficiencies. As a reminder, we manage multiple levers across our P&L, so transaction revenue may fluctuate quarter to quarter as we intentionally reinvest in growth.

Advertising and other revenue grew 10% year over year, reflecting our strong GTV performance, our onboarding of more Carrot Ads partners throughout the year, diversification across more than 9,000 active brand partners, and the extension of our data advantage through off-platform partnerships and new data solutions.

This momentum helped Q4 advertising and other revenue outperform our expectations, even as certain large brand partners continued to navigate macro uncertainty in their businesses. Some of our advertising and other revenue growth is also driving higher payments to publishers, which includes what we pay certain Carrot Ads partners for the benefit of advertising on their sites, and incremental ads budgets that we optimize and deploy on behalf of brands on certain off-platform partnerships. While this shows up as higher cost of revenue, it is intentional and incremental growth by design. That is because these initiatives deepen our relationships with brands, unlock additional ads budgets, and strengthen the broader platform by delivering value to retailers and consumers. While payments to publishers scaled throughout 2025, we expect its year-over-year growth to moderate in 2026.

In Q4, we also continued to demonstrate financial discipline and operating leverage. GAAP net income was $81,000,000, down 46% year over year. This decline was primarily due to higher G&A expenses related to nonrecurring legal and regulatory matters, including a $60,000,000 settlement with the FTC.

Absent these nonrecurring expenses, GAAP net income would have increased year over year. Adjusted EBITDA grew 20% year over year to $303,000,000. We also generated operating cash flow of $184,000,000, up 20% year over year. Because of our confidence in the strength of our business today, and in our ability to keep investing, scaling, and pressing our advantage, we opportunistically repurchased $1,400,000,000 of shares in 2025.

This included $1,100,000,000 of repurchases in Q4 alone, which included our $250,000,000 accelerated share repurchase program. We ended 2025 with approximately $1,000,000,000 in cash and similar assets and $671,000,000 of remaining buyback capacity.

Now on to our Q1 outlook. We are encouraged by the momentum we are seeing across the business and are starting the year from a position of strength. We anticipate GTV to range between $10,125,000,000 to $10,275,000,000. This represents year-over-year growth between 11% to 13%, with GTV growth expected to outpace orders growth as we lap the full launch of our $10 minimum basket feature for Instacart+ members in the prior year quarter. We expect advertising and other revenue to grow 11% to 14% year over year, reflecting the ongoing benefits of diversification across supply and demand across our platform, in addition to a positive start to the year across large, mid-market, and emerging brands.

We are also guiding to Q1 adjusted EBITDA of $280,000,000 to $290,000,000, up year over year by 15% to 19%, and down quarter over quarter primarily due to advertising seasonality. As we look ahead to fiscal 2026, we remain committed to steady annual adjusted EBITDA year-over-year growth at a rate that outpaces GTV growth. Similar to prior years, we expect this rate of expansion to moderate year over year 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 finished 2025 strong and are off to a great start in 2026. Our momentum is building.

We have multiple engines for growth and levers in our P&L to drive durable long-term profitable growth and accelerate omnichannel grocery adoption for the industry. With that, we will open up the call for live questions. Operator, you may begin.

Operator: Thank you so much. And as a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press 11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press 11 again. And we ask that you please keep your questions to one. Please standby while we compile the Q&A roster. We will now open for questions. Our first question comes from Doug Anmuth with JPMorgan. Please proceed.

Doug Anmuth: Thanks so much for taking the question. You just discussed in the letter how grocers come to you for technology and not just as a demand channel. How should we think about the scope of the opportunity here in terms of both marketplace as well as enterprise adoption, and how do you think about the addition of new retailers versus deeper penetration with existing? Thank you.

Chris Rogers: Yes. That is a great question. Thank you, Doug. I will explain how we think about the marketplace and enterprise sides of our business. And I will start by saying both of those have been growing and both are healthy. We do see enterprise as a real strategic advantage, and also, in my view, a very underappreciated side of our business. And I know I made many of these points upfront, but I want to reiterate why enterprise is such an important part of our growth story here. First and foremost, enterprise enables much deeper strategic conversations and much deeper technical integrations with retailers.

It is ultimately what is getting us on the same side of the table, and it is becoming the foundation for the relationships that we have built with retailers. So we are truly innovating there. We plan together on everything that a retailer is trying to achieve. So it helps us drive growth through their owned and operated, but also helps with the overall relationship back on our marketplace so that the enterprise relationship that we have drives improvements in the consumer experience that are felt on both sides. And I would say the other benefit of enterprise, which I want to call out, is that it is driving overall efficiency for us.

It is increasing our order volume and density. It is lowering the cost to serve through shared infrastructure. It is allowing us to reinvest even more in shared technology and capabilities that benefit everyone. And as far as future opportunity goes, I believe that there are significant future opportunities on the enterprise side in two ways. Even though we have launched so many new partners on Storefront Pro, in 2025, we launched 70 versus just 30 the previous year. At 380, I do believe that there is quite a bit of headway here, including internationally. We just launched our first partners internationally with Costco in Spain and France.

So there are expansion opportunities with new retailers, signing and launching them, but also by expanding with more products and services with existing retailers. That is the Costco example that I provided and the Sprouts example, where we call it land and expand internally, where we have the opportunity to continue to serve solutions to retailers to drive growth for both of us over a longer time period. So our focus is really to grow both marketplace and enterprise, and we believe that there is substantial runway ahead.

Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question, please. Nikhil Devnani from Bernstein. Your line is open.

Nikhil Vijay Devnani: Hey, thank you for taking the question. Nice to see the GTV numbers and order growth. What do you think has driven the acceleration in the business as you look across core metrics from users to frequency and retention? And then, related to that, maybe if we just step back a little bit. There is obviously a lot of focus on competition right now from Amazon, DoorDash, and others. But your business is improving. So what are you seeing on the ground in markets where there is more competition? And are we just at an inflection point in grocery e-commerce adoption right now? Is that what you think is helping here? Thank you.

Chris Rogers: Yes. Thanks for the question, Nikhil. I will start with some of the drivers of our Q4 results because we are certainly very proud of our results. As mentioned, GTV was up 14% year on year, which is the strongest we have delivered in three years. From a consumer perspective, we are seeing growth in demand for our service. And look, the core drivers of our Q4 results were strong user growth and strong engagement with our customers. Last year in 2025, 26,000,000 customers used Instacart (Maplebear Inc.), with approximately 10,000,000 unique customers placing at least one order in December. That was a record.

In addition, GTV from our 2025 new customer cohort was the largest that we have added since 2022. And what we are seeing is that we are retaining those customers at higher rates year over year. So we saw very strong new user metrics, and at the same time, we deepened engagement with existing customers, converting annual customers to quarterly and quarterly to monthly at faster rates year over year, and we steadily increased spend per customer through 2025. But when I back up and look at the total picture of what is driving growth, it is not just one thing.

The performance is reflecting multiple growth initiatives working together, including continuous enhancement across products and selection, quality, affordability, and convenience. We also have real momentum with the enterprise platform, as I just stated. And we also have momentum in the club channel, including deeper integrations with Costco with our executive member benefit, and with new and existing partnerships, which drove growth for us, including with restaurants, our restaurant integration with Uber Eats, as well as embedded experience in Grubhub. So it is really not one thing that is driving our performance, it is a compounding effect of a strategy that is working across multiple vectors. And we are executing very strongly against that strategy.

From a competition perspective, I will start by saying none of the competition activity that we are seeing surprises us at all given the size of the market opportunity for online grocery. And also, I have to say, I think that the sentiment around competitive impact to Instacart (Maplebear Inc.) is very overblown. Obviously, we monitor competition extremely closely. But if you take a look at the facts on the field, as you mentioned, Nikhil, our GTV growth accelerated through 2025. Q4 was our strongest quarter in three years, and we guided to 11% to 13%, our strongest guide. That is despite all of the Amazon headlines and expansions and despite restaurant delivery marketplaces expanding with grocery retailers.

We continue to have the leading share among digital-first players. We are exceptionally strong in large baskets, which is 75% of the market. We lead in large basket activations. We lead at converting small baskets to large baskets. And look, we do pay attention. We are watching what others are doing, and others are going to have strategy.

But there is definitely a market for us here, and we feel good about our points of differentiation including our leading experience across selection, quality, affordability, and convenience, and with the entire enterprise platform, which really is a part of the market that others just are not participating in and is actually helped by intense competition as retailers that we partner with are forced to react. So overall, I am confident in the size of the market opportunity for online grocery. There is lots of room to grow. I am confident in our ability to compete in this market in the long run.

Nikhil Vijay Devnani: Thanks, Chris.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jason Helfstein with Oppenheimer. Please proceed.

Chad (for Jason Stuart Helfstein): Hey. Thanks. This is Chad on for Jason. Advertising came in a little bit stronger in the fourth quarter than maybe initially feared. Could you maybe talk about the puts and takes of that? Were you able to drive better adoption, or was, like, kind of macro impacts better than expected? Thank you.

Chris Rogers: Sure. Thank you for the question, Chad. So yes, we did deliver strong ads and other revenue performance, 10% in Q4. I will pull apart the drivers here. So first of all, our growing GTV, which does help fuel investment from brands. That strength was coming from all segments, emerging, mid-market, and large accounts, even though we had highlighted some uncertainty around large brands on our last earnings call. But overall, if I take a giant step back, I think it is fair to say that our diversification strategy across supply, meaning new surfaces where we place ads, and demand, with more advertisers and larger budgets from existing advertisers, that is working.

Carrot Ads expanded to over 310 partners, which is getting us to really significant scale. We now have over 9,000 brands advertising on Instacart (Maplebear Inc.). As of Q4, that is up from 7,000 a year ago. And all of that diversification makes our on-platform ads stronger and more resilient. And at the same time, we are continuing to scale our off-platform ads and data offerings. So we are now partnered with Meta, we are partnered with The Trade Desk, Google. Most recently, we partnered with Pinterest and TikTok.

And we are successfully gathering incremental budgets for campaigns on these surfaces where CPGs can use our first-party data to target our high-intent audiences, measure their performance, and drive conversion back on Instacart (Maplebear Inc.). So overall, I would say our stated strategy of building one of the most powerful and relevant ads ecosystems is working, and we are executing well against that strategy.

Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question that comes from the line of Shweta Khajuria with Wolfe Research. Please proceed.

Shweta R. Khajuria: Thanks a lot for taking my questions. Let me try two, please. The first one is on international growth. As you think about medium to long term, how are you thinking about unlocking that opportunity? And are those markets structurally different when you think about grocery delivery? That is my first. And then second is on local commerce. So is there an opportunity and an unlock in addition to smaller baskets where perhaps you add on local merchants in addition to grocery that could be the next leg of growth? Thank you.

Chris Rogers: Thank you for the question. I will start with international. What we are finding is the markets do operate differently, but we continue to be very excited about our plans to take our technology to new markets. And we believe that is a promising future growth vector for us, which we have been busy validating. So the more time that we spend in new markets speaking to retailers, the more convinced we are there is product market fit for our tech because retailers in these markets abroad are all trying to solve the same problems as retailers in North America. Meanwhile, in many of the markets that we visited, grocery e-commerce is still quite underdeveloped.

Many retailers do not have an online presence at all, or their current website is not shoppable. And retail media is just getting started in many of these markets. We are also seeing interest for our in-store solutions in markets abroad, like Caper and FoodStorm, as retailers look to digitize their in-store experience. So as we have learned more, we are feeling really great about our stated approach. Our approach to going international is we are exploring major markets, the top countries in Europe and in Australia. We are entering with our existing enterprise technology like Storefront Pro, CaperCarts, and FoodStorm. We are not building a new suite of technology for these markets.

We are leveraging the best-in-class tech that we already have and localizing it in a way that we believe will be scalable. Our Costco launch in Spain and France is a great example of that approach. Spain and France are attractive markets. It is Storefront Pro. It is a trusted partner with Costco. All of that said, I will also say that while we have ambitious expansion plans, we are also extremely focused on being disciplined on expenses so that we expand in a way that aligns with our profitability objectives and our ability to deliver annual EBITDA progression. On your second question around local commerce, as of today, we already serve all use cases.

We excel in big baskets, but we are also quite strong in small baskets as well. One of the things that we did a prior year was we reduced the minimum basket for Instacart+ users to $10, which is a lead offering, and that is to attract smaller baskets. In terms of merchants and the types of merchants, our primary focus is grocery. It has always been grocery. We do offer other types of retailers on the platform for the convenience of our customers, but we are primarily focused on the grocery industry.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Bernie McTernan with Needham and Company. Please proceed.

Stefanos (for Bernie McTernan): Hi. This is Stefanos Chris calling from Bernie. Thanks for taking our questions. Just wanted to follow up on the international expansion. How many of your other partners like Costco have international business? And is that the main strategy? Or are you also approaching new customers as well? Thank you.

Chris Rogers: Yes. Great question, Stefanos. So it is a mix. Many partners that exist in North America also exist in Europe. Costco is not alone in that. Many of our partners have a presence there. And it would be easy to look up which ones those were. For us, we are doing both. We are talking to existing partners about expansion like what we did with Costco because we have already got established trusting partnerships, and we think that is strategically wise. And oftentimes, North American retailers are looking for expansion plans because other markets are less developed from an e-commerce perspective.

But we are also in these markets meeting new retailers, selling to new retailers, making new relationships in the major markets in Europe. A great example of that was we spent time with Morrisons on in-store technology, and now we are launching CaperCart very soon in a Morrisons pilot market. So yes, we do have a sales presence in the market. We are talking to net new retailers, and it is a big part of our strategy.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Josh Beck with Raymond James. Please proceed.

Josh Beck: Thank you for taking the question. I wanted to ask a little bit about price parity initiatives. Certainly, it seems like when grocers have adopted this pricing philosophy, you have seen a real nice elasticity benefit. So maybe how those discussions are progressing? And then you obviously shared a lot about agentic tech, which I found very helpful. How do you think about the tailwinds to your business with respect to maybe on-platform, so easing the creation of large baskets? And then how do you think about perhaps the economics and opportunity on the platform? I would assume there is a potentially much larger pool of customers. Just would really like to hear your thoughts on those topics.

Chris Rogers: Thank you for the questions, Josh. I will start with price parity. So, we work closely with retailers on all strategies, including on their pricing strategies. In the case of price parity, or not applying a markup, we do work with retailers on that because we believe it is in their best interest and there is a positive short and long-term ROI for them. We consistently see price parity retailers outperform marked-up retailers on Instacart (Maplebear Inc.). We see better retention at price parity retailers. And this is important not just because we have a very large platform. Retailers obviously want to win share on Instacart (Maplebear Inc.), but also because they do not want to lose share to some of the largest digital players who are increasingly vying for market share.

So we talk to our retail partners about the full strategic approach when it comes to digital. Pricing is one of those. We think it is strategically wise for retailers to consider this. We have seen some movement so far this year. Hy-Vee just went to price parity. Raley's just went to no markups as well on the platform. So we have seen traction. You are going to see us continue to focus on that going forward. When it comes to AI and the influence of agentic consumers, we are innovating here. When it comes to agentic experiences, we are focused on building experiences directly on Instacart (Maplebear Inc.) in a seamless way that is very additive.

We are designing agentic shopping experiences and deeper personalization that is driving better end-to-end outcomes for customers. In fact, we think that we can build the best and most relevant agentic experience because of our unique data advantage that I talked about upfront. It is not easy. Grocery is extremely complex as a category. It is highly personal, especially for the big weekly basket. You can imagine how many preferences or dietary restrictions come into play when you are working on a family's weekly shop.

But we continue to believe that we are in the best position to solve for that complexity directly on Instacart (Maplebear Inc.), and with our first-party data from 1,600,000,000 lifetime orders and our understanding of the grocery consumer. So you will see us continue to do that. We are also partnering off platform over third-party platforms like OpenAI and Google and Microsoft to be wherever customers want to shop. So the example was with OpenAI. We were the first grocery partner to launch native checkout directly on ChatGPT. And we see this chat as a channel to attract demand and make it easy for customers to find Instacart (Maplebear Inc.), land on Instacart (Maplebear Inc.), transact with Instacart (Maplebear Inc.).

That is our approach there.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed.

Eric James Sheridan: Thanks so much for taking the question. Maybe a few just on Instacart+. Any update on the adoption rate you are seeing in terms of people coming into the program? How do you think about investing incrementally in growing in Plus? And any differences you are starting to see or that are widening in terms of frequency, engagement, or cross-platform usage from Instacart+ users? Thanks so much.

Chris Rogers: Yes. Thank you for the question, Eric. We continue to be pleased with the results of Instacart+. Instacart+ continues to represent the majority of GTV and orders on our platform. Paid Instacart+ members continue to grow, and Instacart+ customers are more engaged, and they retain better than nonmembers. And all of that strength is reflected in our overall operating fundamentals that we shared, where we are seeing user growth and new customer retention metrics and deeper engagement with existing customers.

From a strategy perspective, to the second part of your question, Instacart+ is designed to unlock customer value and drive engagement, anchored by the $0 delivery, but as well as several additional benefits like the $0 delivery minimum, which we lowered to $10 for grocery and $25 for restaurants. Also, access to new use cases and services like restaurants with our Uber Eats integration, New York Times Cooking, Peacock Premium. We expanded family accounts to three members. We also have in-app credits through select Chase partnerships.

I will also mention, which is relatively unknown, that the value of Instacart+ member extends beyond just our marketplace, with the majority of our storefront retailers also using Instacart+ and offering $0 delivery there as well. So overall, Eric, we are pleased with the performance of the program. And yes,

Eric James Sheridan: Thank you.

Operator: One moment for our next question. Comes from the line of Colin Sebastian with Baird. Please proceed.

Colin Sebastian: Great. Good afternoon, and thanks for taking my questions. I guess first maybe just a follow-up on competition. I know you said that you studied this in a lot of detail. So I guess, are you seeing that there are distinct use cases for consumers compared to how they may be using the traditional retailers or e-commerce platforms for grocery, or is it just that the market is so large and online penetration is so low that there is just room for multiple players? And then my second question is actually on CaperCarts and sort of in-store monetization, and maybe ultimately how that ties as well to enterprise.

But given the lift in basket size from the prompts on CaperCarts and even beyond that, what is the appetite you are seeing for advertising within the carts, for demand for the carts, and ultimately, the pipeline for that? Thank you.

Chris Rogers: Yes. Thank you, Colin. On the competition point, I do think that some of the competition is pulling in incremental use cases, small basket use cases. We continue to perform well in small and large baskets. But we do continue to win where it matters most, which is big baskets. Baskets over $75 represent 75% of the digital market. And given the nature of some of the other offerings that we are seeing out there from Amazon and others—Amazon is an example. Their same-day experience, there are a few thousand SKUs and four to five-hour delivery windows. To me, their experience is inherently geared towards smaller fill-in orders and not the weekly shop with over a dozen items.

We see that play out in the data that we see. Some of the same-day grocery baskets appear to be well below $50. And also, we are seeing that as Amazon has ramped up their same-day perishable expansion, the biggest source of their grocery customers are coming from in-store, and it is not a share shift from us. And on that point, I do not want to underestimate what that means for our business because as a company that works with hundreds of retailers that compete with some of these large players, it is the ultimate rallying cry for the rest of our partners.

The rest of the market needs a technology partner to help them compete and win, and we are that trusted partner. From an in-store perspective, at the highest level, we believe deeply in the opportunity for technology in the physical store. With e-commerce at low double digits, the vast majority of transactions are still happening in store for the foreseeable future. And there is a massive opportunity to modernize and digitize that experience with seamless operations and advanced personalization, wayfinding, advertising to help customers discover products and to help customers save money while they are shopping. From a Caper perspective, Caper is an ideal solution to this, and it is an ideal way to engage the consumer.

We are seeing great momentum. We have thousands of cart commitments with retailers, big and small. We are now live in nearly 100 cities across 15 states. We launched new pilots in 2025 with Sprouts and Wegmans, and globally with Coles in Australia, and as I mentioned, with Morrisons in the UK. From a scale perspective, we are also continuing to expand with Wakefern, where we are now live at about 20% of their stores, and where we have recently launched shoppable display ads as our first foray into the ads business. So overall, our learnings are that customers love the experience.

Retailers love it for the operational benefits and the potential to digitize their customers and turn them into omnichannel customers. And then, of course, we are all encouraged by the early signals we are getting from an ad revenue perspective. So I remain optimistic about the future of Caper and incredibly focused on accelerating our momentum here.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Boone with Citizens. Please proceed.

Andrew Boone: Thanks so much for taking the question. I wanted to ask about your ChatGPT partnership. Now that Instant Checkout is live, can you talk about the advertising intensity that you are seeing with those orders? Is there anything that we should think as we think about the evolution of retail media now as those channels start to mature?

Chris Rogers: Thank you. Sure. So, when it comes to ChatGPT, maybe I will just back up and say our approach with the AI platforms right now is to ensure that we are served up in a high-quality way in a way that respects our data, but we are anywhere where a consumer wants to shop. And so our goal is to help define what grocery shopping looks like across the next generation of digital agents, including body form. So we want to show up. We want to help co-create the experience. On OpenAI, our partnership with OpenAI allows for consumers to shop, pay, and now transact directly inside ChatGPT's app experience. So no switching or additional steps are required.

We were the first company to do that. But we are also partnering with others. We are partnering with Google and Microsoft. In fact, we expect every generative AI company will connect into our grocery engine to drive demand for our retailers. From an ads perspective, I think our immediate priority here is going to be to make sure that we are discoverable wherever customers choose to shop and that experience is incredible and we are able to drive more users to our platform. And we think if we nail that, there will be lots of opportunities to monetize that down the road. But more broadly, we are very excited about the opportunity of AI and ads together.

That intersection, we think long term, is going to be a benefit to our business. And there are a few reasons for that. One is on Instacart (Maplebear Inc.). So as you know, we are building conversational commerce and agentic experiences. At the exact same time, the ads team is innovating alongside our consumer team who are building those agentic experiences, and our ads will be directly informed by how consumers engage in agentic shopping. So our overall agentic ad strategy here is to build trust and utility with consumers that leverage everything that we have already learned from online and in store.

And the other thing that we are doing is we are using AI to improve all aspects of our ad technology, including behind the scenes with ranking and relevance and personalization. We are making all sponsored product ads more relevant, driving stronger engagement, and more items added to the cart. We are improving advertising tooling and efficiency, making it easy for advertisers to manage and drive performance of campaigns, especially when it comes to emerging brands. Most notably, we have expanded our set of AI-powered recommendations for advertisers. So for example, where in a campaign is there headroom to raise your ROAS target while delivering your campaign goals? Or where can you increase new-to-brand coverage within the campaign?

So we are highly engaged. We think we can be a leader here, and we look forward to the role that AI can play broadly in our advertising product down the road.

Andrew Boone: Thank you.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Deepak Mathivanan with Cantor Fitzgerald. Please proceed.

Deepak Mathivanan: Great. Thanks for taking the question. Chris, obviously, I think grocery is one area where the way consumers shop can have a meaningful change with all the AI tools. I know you launched the Cart Assistant basically for cart planning and things like that. And now we also have integrations with ChatGPT and others. Are you seeing meaningful change in how consumers are doing grocery shopping, maybe starting with what they need for the week or for a specific recipe instead of staying with their typical routine for grocery shopping? And when do you expect some of the Cart Assistant and other AI experiences to be more broadly available? Then perhaps one more question on competition.

What are you seeing specifically on retailers where Uber and DoorDash rolled out in the few months? Are you seeing any consumer behavior changes? Thanks so much.

Chris Rogers: Yes. Thank you for the question. What I would say on all grocery-engaged agentic experiences is, first of all, I am a believer that consumer behavior is going to shift over time, but it is still very, very early here. If we look at some of the referral traffic that we get from outside platforms, it is all very small. It is all kind of not material at this point in time. We are investing because we do believe that consumer trends are going to change over time. So we want to make sure that we are there. However, it is still very early days and relatively small relative to the size of our overall business.

We are extremely excited about Cart Assistant, which is being built on top of our very large and proprietary data set, which is key here. We are making significant progress. We were not racing to get this out the door. Our goal is to make our Cart Assistant the absolute best, the most relevant experience for consumers, especially since we are going to be extending this onto partners like Sprouts and Kroger. So our view is many early agentic experiences are going to be limited in scope, operate as single-step interactions, which can potentially create friction. Our goal is to have a comprehensive agent out in market. We are beta testing now, Deepak. We are moving quickly.

We are learning a lot. We have plans to roll out on Instacart (Maplebear Inc.) Marketplace by the end of Q1. To the second part of your question on Dash and Uber specifically, when it comes to retailers sitting on other marketplaces, marketplace expansion, first of all, is not unexpected at all. And again, we grew despite, to use the DoorDash example, DoorDash and Kroger launched at the beginning of Q4. We just had our best quarterly growth in three years. And these launches to us really reinforce what I have been saying all along, which is when a retailer goes nonexclusive, that is steady state. We see other platforms' growth plateaus. And their basket size stays small.

It is under $75. We remain the share of sales leader versus digital-first players at these retailers. We are also now seeing that as other marketplaces add retailers, the incremental growth that they see from each additional retailer diminishes. Their growth is increasingly coming from other retailers on their own platform. So at the end of the day, I do not lose sleep over any of this because our marketplace is strong. Our enterprise platform makes us even more resilient. And it gives us a seat at the table with retailers that a stand-alone marketplace does not have.

If you look ahead, although I mentioned last earnings that 80% of our GTV already comes from nonexclusive retailers, I just want to be clear that our model has always assumed that retailers would sit on multiple marketplaces. That dynamic is fully embedded into our guidance and into our long-term strategy.

Deepak Mathivanan: Thank you.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Ross Sandler with Barclays. Please proceed.

Ross Sandler: Great. Going back to advertising, you guys, I think, said that for Q1 ads are going to grow 11% to 14%. It is a nice acceleration off of a four-point tougher comp. So could you just talk about what you are seeing thus far in the quarter and then the pipeline? Are we finally through the rough patch with large CPG? And then, Emily, to bring you in, you mentioned that COGS might leverage in 2026 on the publisher fees. So could you just talk about that, elaborate there? And then is that material enough to have an impact on overall incremental margins in 2026? Thank you.

Chris Rogers: Yes. Thanks, Ross. I will address advertising, and then we can pass it over to Emily. So yes, we are very happy. We are off to a very strong start in 2026. As you point out, we just guided to 11% to 14% for Q1. What I will say is that we believe we have the right strategy here, and we are executing well against it. We are already a top-five retail media network. And we are continuing to expand our scale and our reach across our growing marketplace, across our expanding Carrot Ads footprint, off platform, and with our data solution. So our strategy is sound. Looking ahead, we are not providing guidance beyond Q1.

There is still some macro uncertainty that we are seeing in the market and some ongoing changes in consumer preferences as an example. But overall, our plan and our approach is to focus on driving strong year-on-year growth by continuing to diversify in terms of supply and demand, ensuring that we are building the largest and most effective ads ecosystem. We have a very clear set of building blocks, which involves continuing to innovate on platform with advanced personalization and relevancy and all of the AI tooling I described, driving exceptional performance and measurement for brands is our goal, and then extend all of that innovation to Carrot Ads.

Again, we are at 310 Carrot Ads partners now, which gives us real scale. And then extend in store on CaperCarts, which we just launched, and I continue to believe that this is going to be one of the most interesting in-store advertising opportunities out there.

And then we are going to use our first-party data to extend off platform. We are still early with off platform, but we have built a strong foundation here. We have the right set of partners, and we are excited to scale that further. So with the strategy, we are confident in the space and our ability to deliver our long-term targets here. But we do believe that we are—I am optimistic about what we can achieve in ads.

Michael Paul Morton: Yes. Hey, Ross. Thanks for the question. So just to get a little more specific on what I was trying to call out is that, if you look at adjusted cost of revenue through the course of last year, you did see a little bit of a modest step up in Q4 related to cost of revenue. And so I wanted to call that out because while the majority of cost of revenue is going to be from credit card transaction payments that do scale relatively with GTV, there is a component of cost of revenue that we do call out in our filings, which is payments to publishers. And so I wanted to specifically give some context of what that includes. It is effectively two things.

One is what we pay certain of our Carrot Ads partners for the benefit of advertising on their services, as well as the budgets that we get where we are optimizing and deploying ad dollars on behalf of brands for certain of our off-platform partnerships. So it is not all of our off-platform partnerships. Now to your question around, is this going to cause overall impact to margins writ large? What I would say is that first of all, what I wanted to highlight is that payments to publishers specifically did scale throughout 2025. We do expect that year-over-year growth to moderate in 2026. Now, when I think about the P&L as a whole, I would say two things.

First of all, that was a relatively modest impact, and we think that we have multiple levers across the P&L to drive profitability over time. And you have seen us drive that pretty effectively over time. Now we did say that our expectation is that the expansion of EBITDA—while we look to continue to expand EBITDA, grow EBITDA faster than GTV through the course of 2026—that rate of expansion we do expect to moderate. And that is because you have seen quite a lot of OpEx leverage, as one example, over the course of the last couple of years.

We do have a number of great opportunities to reinvest in growth that we are seeing in terms of both short, medium, and long-term bets. So I would not necessarily tie those two thoughts together. I think we have great opportunities to drive growth and continue to have many levers at our disposal to turn that into profitable growth over time.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Michael Morton with MoffettNathanson. Please proceed.

Michael Morton: Hi, thank you. Maybe, Emily, if I could just follow up on what we were just talking, and I really appreciate the detail on the cost of revenue. Could you maybe speak a little bit about the contributors to advertising growth between on-site and off-site in the guide? Does that imply maybe some improvement in the on-site growth rate because we were trying to do some of that math that you talked about with the publisher payments as well? And then also, I think probably for Emily, could you quantify the contribution that you are seeing from Kroger's decision to change their fulfillment kind of business models, I would say, and what will then flow to Instacart (Maplebear Inc.) and maybe how much of that is included in your guidance? Thank you.

Emily Reuter: Sure. I can jump in. Chris, feel free to add any detail. So in terms of contribution to ads from on-site versus off-site, we think of on-site, just to clarify, as a combination of the ads that we serve on our Marketplace as well as through Carrot Ads. If you come to Instacart (Maplebear Inc.) to advertise and you deploy dollars, those are deployed across that full suite of surfaces.

And so just to be clear, while we have talked about off platform because there is something that stands out specifically in the cost of revenue line, really what we are talking about is an ads business that is primarily comprised of that on-site—or we call it on-platform internally—ads revenue, and we are continuing to see growth driven by on-platform. So off-platform is a smaller contributor overall, but it is something that is starting to see some growth and some benefits, so definitely worth calling out.

In terms of specifically quantifying contribution from Kroger, we do not call out specific retailers, but we are definitely happy to see that what we are able to provide in terms of same-day logistics—something that we thought was always a really critical benefit in terms of understanding the desire from consumers to get their groceries when they want it, when they need it, which in the majority of cases is on demand—that we are able to step in and provide that service for our partner.

Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. Comes from the line of Mark Zgutowicz with Benchmark. Please proceed.

Mark Zgutowicz: Thank you. I was just curious how you see the timeline for the ads opportunity in Europe developing given a lack of 1P data in the region? And do you anticipate the incremental ads benefit here to come largely from net new brands or your existing global partners? Thank you.

Chris Rogers: Thank you for the question, Mark. Our approach to Europe, when we take a step back and we look at which technologies we are taking to Europe, we are primarily focused on Storefront Pro, which oftentimes has ads embedded directly into it. So we will have ads capabilities over time. CaperCart, which also has an advertising surface area that we think is going to be monetizable over time. And then FoodStorm, which is our catering software. So our approach is going to be to take our technology, work with retailers, start to solve complex problems, and start to build new relationships with retailers abroad. And then advertising will be a fast follow-on once we have the surface areas that are at scale to advertise in those markets.

Operator: Thank you. And ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our Q&A session and conference for today. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect.

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