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Meet the Instacart mafia: Here are 14 alumni of the
grocery-delivery company who have founded their own
startups and collectively raised at least $144 million from
VCs
Samantha Stokes, Madeline Renbarger, and Vishal Persaud
Andreea Akerele Francis of SilkChart; Tiffany Pang of Outreach Grid, and Andrew Wynn of Ascend Andreea Akerele
Francis, Tiffany Pang, Andrew Wynn
Some former Instacart employees have left the
company to found their own startups.
These founders are building companies in insurtech, coliving, and AI.
Meet 14 Instacart mafia members who have collectively
raised at least $144 million for their own startups.
Former Instacart employees are in good company.
The grocery delivery company -- which recently went public on the
Nasdaq stock exchange -- has both attracted and shed scads of highlevel talent in its 11-year history.
Now, some alumni are taking on a new job title: startup founder.
Meet the Instacart mafia, which includes former chief growth officer
Elliot Shmukler and Andreea Akerele Francis, the company's head of
product, retention and growth from 2018 to 2021. They and others have
now founded companies of their own that have raised millions of dollars
in VC funding. Many more employees may found their own startups
after receiving a windfall from Instacart's IPO.
PayPal set the standard of formidable former employees who now run
companies and investment firms of their own, including tech giants like
YouTube, Yelp, Tesla, and LinkedIn. Facebook and Oracle each have
their own mafias and more recent tech companies like Square and Stripe
now have mafias of their own.
In Instacart's case, some former employees have branched out to found
insurtech and AI startups, while others stayed close to their roots and
continued to innovate in the grocery delivery space.
These companies have been backed by top VC firms — such as SoftBank,
First Round Capital, and Two Sigma — as well as prestigious startup
accelerator programs like Y Combinator. In total, the Instacart mafia
has fundraiser at least $144 million from investors, according to data
from Pitchbook and the founders themselves.
Take a look at Insider's list of 14 Instacart mafia members
who are now startup founders.
Elliot Shmukler and Jeremy Stanley,
Anomalo
Elliot Shmukler, one of the co-founders of Anomalo Elliot Shmukler
Total funding: $39 million
Notable investors: First Round Capital, Foundation Capital, Norwest
Venture Partners, Nextview Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures
Total employees: 50
Role at Instacart: Chief growth officer
As Instacart's chief growth officer from 2016 to 2018, Elliot Shmukler
oversaw a rapid period of expansion for Instacart, helping the company
massively scale grocery sales and paid Instacart Express subscribers.
Shmukler teamed up with his colleague Jeremy Stanley, who was the
chief data scientist at Instacart from 2015 to 2018, to found Anomalo
after seeing the problems that low-quality data could cause for startups
in hypergrowth like Instacart. Anomalo scans data sets to automatically
detect data issues and point to their root causes, helping engineers solve
problems efficiently.
Shmukler and Stanley have raised nearly $39 million to date in venture
capital funding, with investors like Norwest Venture Partners and First
Round Capital writing checks to the startup.
Praveen Chekuri and Andrew Wynn,
Ascend
Praveen Chekuri and Andrew Wynn, co-founders of Ascend Praveen Chekuri, Andrew
Wynn
Total funding: $36 million
Notable investors: First Round Capital, Index Ventures, Susa
Ventures
Total employees: 24
Role at Instacart: Chekuri was a software engineer, and Wynn was on
the data and catalog team.
Chekuri and Wynn met at Instacart and are second-time founders with
Ascend, an automated financial services startup in the insurance space.
Founded in April 2021, Ascend last year raised a $30 million Series A
funding round led by Index Ventures.
Prior to Ascend, the duo founded home maintenance startup Sheltr,
which was acquired by insuretech company Hippo.
Wynn told Insider that when working together at Instacart, the pair
appreciated the value of "every minute counts," which encouraged teams
to work quickly and efficiently to become profitable.
"We still embody the mindset of 'every minute counts' today and we
attribute much of our success to what we learned during our formative
time at Instacart," he said.
Jonathan Hillis, Cabin
Jonathan Hillis, founder of Cabin Jonathan Hillis
Total funding: Undisclosed, according to PitchBook
Notable investors: EBerg Capital, Awesome People Ventures, Draft
Ventures, and Multicoin Capital, according to PitchBook
Total employees: 6, according to PitchBook
Role at Instacart: Director of product, shoppers and marketplace.
Hillis founded Cabin in 2021, with the mission of creating a "global coliving network" where physical locations have a shared culture,
economy, and governance. Catered to remote workers, the startup offers
weeklong houseshares in nature as well as a membership option for
people to co-live and work together permanently in locations including
Puerto Rico, Washington State, and Massachusetts.
He started the company with his earnings from Instacart, where he
worked for six years — most recently as the director of product,
shoppers and marketplace.
Prior to that role, which he held from 2020 to 2021, Hillis was
Instacart's group product manager for shoppers and was also a product
manager for the company's performance marketing, shopper growth,
and availability teams.
Ofek Lavian, Forage
Ofek Lavian, cofounder and CEO of Forage. Forage
Total funding: $22.5 million
Notable investors: PayPal Ventures, Y Combinator, Instacart
cofounder Apoorva Mehta
Total employees: 40, according to PitchBook
Roles at Instacart: Head of payments.
While at Instacart, Lavian launched its SNAP payments system, which
allowed families who received the food assistance benefit to buy
groceries online. Building out the process to accept SNAP online was no
easy task, Lavian told Fast Company, and it took nearly nine months to
complete the process since there was only one choice for payments
software.
He later left Instacart and joined Forage in 2021 to help build out the
software that aims to help merchants accept SNAP payments online. "I
was inspired by my experience at Instacart, building products that
enabled low-income Americans to spend their food benefits online,"
Lavian said.
Andrew Duberstein and Dayton Thorpe,
Mercator
Andrew Duberstein and Dayton Thorpe, co-founders of Mercator Andrew Duberstein,
Dayton Thorpe
Total funding: Unknown
Notable investors: Y Combinator, Soma Capital, Tribe Capital, Rebel
Fund
Total employees: 3
Role at Instacart: Duberstein was a staff data scientist, and Thorpe, a
senior data scientist.
Andrew Duberstein and Dayton Thorpe met while working together on
Instacart's data science team, and then decided to team up and work on
their own startup, Mercator, an AI-assisted tool to write "faster, smarter,
and cheaper" SQL code, according to the company's website.
Mercator was accepted into Y Combinator's summer 2022 batch,
following in the footsteps of their previous employer, which was also a
YC alum. Since the batch, Thorpe and Duberstein have built multiple
data tools for Mercator, including the popular Census Explorer, which
lets users write natural language to analyze census data.
Noam Szpiro, Monocle
Noam Szpiro, CEO and founder of Monocle Noam Szpiro
Total funding: Undisclosed, according to PitchBook
Notable investors: Undisclosed, according to PitchBook
Total employees: Undisclosed, according to PitchBook
Role at Instacart: Director of Engineering.
Szpiro founded Monocle in January to offer a promotions operating
system that gives consumer brands the option to set up promotional
campaigns using AI. He's not only an Instacart alum, but also worked at
Lyft, where he was a senior engineering manager. His experiences at
both companies laid the groundwork for what inspired him to found
Monocle.
At Lyft, his team built the promotional targeting system and saw how
effective it could be, Szpiro told Insider. "At Instacart, I saw how small
price changes affect conversion dramatically and how advanced AI can
accelerate growth," he added.
Tiffany Pang, Outreach Grid
Tiffany Pang, CEO of Outreach Grid Tiffany Pang
Total funding: Undisclosed
Notable investors: DG Ventures
Total employees: 10
Role at Instacart: Software engineer and catalog data lead
Tiffany Pang joined Instacart during the company's early days in 2014,
"when there were 20-something people in a three-story house in SoMa's
South Park," she said. At Instacart, she built its first data catalog of
assets such as inventory pictures and descriptions by sorting through
information and building category types for software engineers.
"I had the good fortune to see not just how a startup was made but also
be part of a fast-growing company — how they started with no
information about a grocery store to launching store after store with
unique inventories and prices, how they recruited shoppers and trained
them, how to make the experience for customers seamless and
delightful," she said.
After leaving Instacart and participating in a coding boot-camp course,
Pang founded the social-impact startup Outreach Grid, which runs a
collaborative software suite for service outreach workers, service
providers, law enforcement, and city management to manage a city's
homeless services.
"Teaching, mentoring, how to grow an operation, how to build a
product, how to build and grow a team, how to think about constructing
company values — those are the values and experiences that I took with
me when I left to ultimately start my own startup," she told Insider.
Kaitlyn Knopp, Pequity
Kaitlyn Knopp, co-founder and CEO of Pequity Kaitlyn Knopp
Total funding: $19 million, according to PitchBook
Notable investors: First Round Capital, Scribble Ventures, Norwest
Venture Partners
Total employees: 49, according to PitchBook
Role at Instacart: Head of Global Compensation
As a longtime compensation specialist, Knopp spent four years
managing benefits at Google before jumping to self-driving car startup
Cruise to head up its compensation and people analytics team. She
joined Instacart in 2019 as the startup's Head of Global Compensation.
Knopp left Inscart in 2021 to build Pequity, an employee compensation
management software that helps companies improve pay accuracy and
equity. In 2021, the startup landed $15.5 million in Series A funding led
by Norwest Venture Partners.
JJ Tang and Quentin Rousseau, Rootly
JJ Tang and Quentin Rousseau, co-founders of Rootly JJ Tang, Quentin Rousseau
Total funding: $15.2 million
Notable investors: XYZ Venture Capital, Gradient Ventures, Y
Combinator
Total employees: 32, according to PitchBook
Roles at Instacart: Tang was a senior product manager, and
Rousseau was a senior reliability engineer.
Tang and Rousseau met while they were at Instacart and through their
experiences there, realized there was a need for a better way to handle
incident response for things like outages. As Instacart grew rapidly,
particularly during the pandemic, it became clear to the cofounders that
the process to resolve and learn from incidents was critical.
With their startup Rootly, teams can automate and manage a lot of the
manual administrative work that comes with incident response. And it's
used by hundreds of companies including TripAdvisor, Nvidia,
Grammarly, and Canva, Tang said.
Andreea Akerele Francis , SilkChart
Andreea Akerele Francis, CEO of SilkChart SilkChart
Total funding: $5.2 million
Notable investors: Y Combinator, SoftBank, Harlem Capital, Global
Founders Capital
Total employees: 5
Role at Instacart: Head of product, retention.
Francis was at Instacart from 2017 to 2021 and served all but one of
those years as the head of product focusing on customer retention for
the company.
After leaving Instacart to start her own AI-powered sales coaching and
analytics company SilkChart, she and her cofounder were accepted into
the startup accelerator Y Combinator for its Summer 2022 batch. "I was
fortunate to learn a lot from Instacart's founders while working closely
with them, especially about the importance of attracting and retaining
great people," she said.
SilkChart has raised $5.2 million in seed funding so far from investors.
Will Nichols, Umamicart
Will Nichols, COO and co-founder of Umamicart Will Nichols
Total funding: $9.3 million, according to the company
Notable investors:M13, FJ Labs, Picus, Starting Line, Golden
Ventures
Total employees: 12 full-time employees and 30 part-time employees,
according to the company
Role at Instacart: General manager
Nichols cut his teeth in the grocery delivery world by working at
Instacart from 2014 to 2017 in roles including operations manager and
GM. Before that, he spent four years as a marketing associate and in
business development at TripAdvisor.
After Instacart, Nichols went back to school to earn an MBA at New
York University's Stern School of Business and interned at early-stage
tech firm Schematic Ventures, as well as Dorm Room Fund, the studentled VC firm backed by First Round Capital. He then spent another two
years immersing himself in the venture capital world as an associate at
FJ Labs, which focuses on early-stage marketplace, consumer, and
fintech startups.
In 2020, Nichols launched Umamicart, an online grocery store that
specializes in Asian food items. The startup, which offers grocery items
and pantry staples, currently delivers to addresses in New York and the
mid-Atlantic region. It raised seed funding at the end of 2021, and
Nichols serves as the startup's COO.
"I've leaned on this Instacart alumni network for advice and guidance in
everything from fundraising to operating advice, and I've leveraged the
network: Umamicart counts Instacart alums as both employees and
investors," Nichols told Insider.
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