Apoorva Mehta Failed 20 Times Before Launching Instacart
By Kelli Luu | 07 May, 2026

Once a struggling entrepreneur, Apoorva Mehta built Instacart into a billion-dollar company and is now betting on AI to transform investing.

Apoorva Mehta failed at developing a successful startup 20 times before creating one of the most recognizable companies in modern tech. 

He was born in India and grew up moving across different countries, eventually settling in Ontario, Canada when he was a teen. Mehta attended the University of Waterloo and graduated with a degree in electrical engineering. After graduation, he worked as a design engineer at Blackberry and later joined Amazon as a supply-chain engineer in 2008. 

Mehta’s departure from Amazon came in 2010 when he decided to move to San Francisco to become an entrepreneur. He launched 20 startups that all failed, but that did not stop him from his next idea. 

There was always one problem he took note of growing up: being low on groceries and not owning a car. This led him to create Instacart in 2012 and he designed it to solve this simple, but universal problem of getting groceries delivered quickly and efficiently. When looking for ways to get early funding, Mehta realized he had missed the Y Combinator deadline, so he used his app prototype to deliver beer to a Y Combinator partner, who was immediately intrigued and admitted Instacart to the Summer 2012 batch. 

From there, Instacart became a hit. The company partnered with major grocery stores like Costco and Kroger and were able to expand rapidly across the country. The real growth exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the demand for grocery delivery surged overnight. During this time, Mehta described this experience as “five years of growth in five weeks”. 

Today, Instacart is publicly traded with a market cap of over $10 billion. Instacart reached a peak valuation of $39 billion in 2021, making it one of the most valuable startups in the U.S. That same year, Mehta stepped down as CEO, then made his full exit by 2023 to focus on other ventures. 

Just recently, Mehta launched his newest business called Abundance, an AI-driven hedge fund that aims to change the way people view investing. $100 million has already been raised in seed funding, which just shows how natural this part of entrepreneurship has become for Mehta.