Instacart founder and Chief Executive Officer Apoorva Mehta is now a billionaire, as the company's popularity rises during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to business magazine Forbes.
33-year-old Mehta's net worth is $1.2 billion after Instacart's latest financing round. The fundraising hiked the company's valuation to $13.7 billion from $7.9 billion, Forbes reported.
Mehta started the San Francisco-based grocery delivery company in 2012, and currently owns a 10 percent stake, according to a Forbes estimate.
Instacart's order volume has increased 500 percent in the past 12 months, and the average customer spend has risen by 35 percent per order.
A spokesperson for Instacart declined to comment when contacted by Forbes.
Mehta, who was born in India and raised in Canada, studied engineering at the University of Waterloo.
Before starting Instacart, he worked with Amazon as a supply chain engineer. Mehta has also worked with Blackberry and Qualcomm as a design engineer.
After he quit Amazon in 2010, Mehta had 20 startup ideas that failed, Los Angeles Times reported in 2017.
"The reason to start a company should never be to start a company. The reason to start a company should be to solve a problem that you truly, truly care about," Mehta said at a Y Combinator talk in 2014 as quoted by Forbes.
Mehta was Instacart's first customer, placing the order on the app and delivering the products to himself, Forbes reported.
