CART, DASH, UBER: Instacart puts itself on the shopping list? Our take on the M&A chatter

Late on Friday, The Information reported that Instacart is exploring a sale and held preliminary conversations with DoorDash and Uber. The news sent CART shares up 9%. Bloomberg subsequently reported that Uber has already walked away from the discussion. This is both a surprising and unsurprising development: the business logic is there and we could see both DASH/UBER and CART benefitting from an acquisition, but the timing is surprising. We don't see how UBER does this deal on top of DHER, and even DASH is in the midst of integrating recently acquired assets, though it feels more feasible financially. The way this was reported, with CART shopping itself around rather than vice versa, also leads us to believe it remains speculative. The combination makes strategic sense to us — DASH and UBER are keen to build out Grocery verticals, and CART has valuable enterprise relationships and a sticky audience of high value users, though customer growth is its biggest challenge. There would be op