Instacart Takes Wedding Party to Have and Hold

Instacart, the on-demand grocery delivery company, has made its first acquisition, hiring the team from Wedding Party — a mobile app that lets wedding guests create shareable, online photo albums and videos — TechCrunch reported Tuesday (Aug. 4).

TechCrunch said that half a dozen employees, the majority of them engineers, are headed to Instacart in a deal where the terms remain undisclosed. Those engineers, the site said, are occupying consumer-facing aspects of Instacart, such as within the shopper-facing app. Wedding Party founders Ajay Kamat, Himani Amoli, and Gordon McCreight are among those coming on board to Instacart, which will continue to support the Wedding Party app itself.

The acquihire just may be the first among many. Instacart’s VP of communications, Andrea Saul, told TechCrunch that the company would be on the lookout for more teams to join them.

At the time of the acquisition, Wedding Party had a reach across more than 600,000 couples, as well as the couples’ several million guests. But the company ultimately had to choose between raising more capital or agreeing to be acquired, and it chose the latter.

TechCrunch noted that the on-demand market has been growing, which in turn has pushed Instacart to hire at a rapid pace — going from 120 employees at the beginning of 2015, to 275 at the present time. The company operates its on-demand delivery service in 16 metropolitan regions nationwide. Management downplayed the idea that Instacart would look to buy competitors in new markets, according to TechCrunch, even as the market for food delivery via tech platform becomes ever-more crowded.

“We really have the game plan down pat for how to go into new cities. We understand what it takes from a customer experience standpoint, from a logistics standpoint,” noted Saul. “If we were to go somewhere new, people wouldn’t be able to keep up with the infrastructure and the technology that we’ve built.”

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