Ultra one-hour service Instacart one year later

A year ago, when the electric-business giant, Amazon, did not "deliver on the day", Instacart, a former start-up, decided to use the "one-hour delivery" model. A year ago, when all YC partners were Instacart founder Apoorva Mehta Dour No, Mehta did not give up but used their services to give the YC partner a dozen beers in half an hour. So he succeeded in making YC an exception and successfully entered the YC hatch two months after the application was due. Now, it is rumored that Instacart has been with a non-VC agency (perhaps a PE fund) signed TS, valued at 400 million U.S. dollars. Previously, Instacart completed the 8.5 million dollar a round, which was led by Sequoia Capital last July.

Instacart uses the Ultra O2O model, and the local large business super (including Whole Foods, Costco and other large chain, also includes Rainbow Grocery, Dominick ' s and other regional brand grocery stores docking, customers through the Instacart website app can directly complete the order, and then Instacart's own distribution team to complete the rapid distribution. Before doing the same city, Instacart can guarantee one hour delivery. Now Instacart has business in 8 major cities in the United States, and the delivery time is extended to guarantee delivery on that day.

After the completion of a round of nearly half a year, Instacart business experienced rapid development. By the first two months of its landing in New York, its sales figures had increased 2.4 times-fold. And this round of financing is also to accelerate its business expansion.

The domestic similar Ultra O2O project has "u Box supermarket", "thumb side buys". In contrast, U-Box supermarkets believe that the traditional advantages of local ultra inventory management, logistics deployment, so do not participate in the supermarket's offline section, mainly for the offline supermarket to provide a line of traffic entry, the model is more like "Shop No. 1th." While the thumb shopping on the supermarket as a unit online display, and for supermarkets to provide promotions, unified logistics and other solutions, customers can search for nearby supermarkets to buy.

In the period I Got it! , u Box supermarket coo Zhao Jinpeng that this year will be the line of large business over the Internet Department of general merchandise. The beginning of last year was a budding period and everyone was still groping. But now there are Hunan chain supermarkets start big moves to try, but also includes a large number of third-party technical services, such as Web sites, do the app, are beginning to slowly tend to the offline retail, as well as Apple's ibeacon technology, but also for the offline retail services. Capital market, this year no longer to invest in electricity, all in the offline, serving the O2O entrepreneurial team investment. On the other hand, the large supermarket chain itself does not have a direct competitive relationship, so it is easy to duplicate the pattern between each other, so that more supermarkets began to spread to the direction of electronic business development.