August 28, 2023: On Friday, Instacart, the grocery delivery firm, slashed its valuation during the previous year’s market slide.

The stock stated on the Nasdaq under the “CART.” In its prospectus, the company said net income wasted $114 million, while revenue in the recent quarter hit $716 million, a 15% increase from the year-ago period. According to the filing, Instacart has been profitable for five straight quarters.

Instacart said it will continue incorporating artificial intelligence and device to know features into the platform. It expects the company to “rely on AIML solutions to help drive future growth in our business.” In May, Instacart said it was leaning into the generative AI boom with Ask Instacart, a search tool that aims to answer customers’ grocery shopping questions.

“We believe the future of grocery won’t be regarding choosing between shopping online and in-store,” CEO Fidji Simo wrote in the prospectus. “Most of us are going to do both. So we want to make an omni-channel experience that gets the best online shopping knowledge to physical stores, and vice versa.”

Instacart will try and crack open the IPO market, which has been mostly closed since late 2021. In December of that year, software vendor HashiCorp and Samsara, which develops cloud technology for industrial organizations, went public, but there have been no notable venture-backed tech IPOs since. Chip designer Arm, owned by Japan’s SoftBank, filed for a Nasdaq listing on Monday.

Founded in 2012 and initially incorporated as Maplebear Inc., Instacart will join a crop known as gig economy enterprises on the public market, following the debut in 2020 of Airbnb and DoorDash and car-sharing companies Uber and Lyft a year earlier. They could have been a better bet for investors, as only Airbnb trades past its IPO price.

According to its website, instacart shoppers and drivers deliver goods in over 5,500 cities from around 40,000 grocers and other stores. The business took off during the COVID-19 pandemic as consumers avoided public places. But profitability has always been a significant challenge, as it is all around much of the gig economy, because of the high costs associated with paying all those contractors.