When it comes to going public, Instacart is reportedly settling for deferred gratification.
The San Francisco startup, which confidentially filed its initial public offering paperwork earlier this year, has decided to delay going public until next year,. The food delivery business is making the move in response to the turmoil in the markets that has sent stock prices down across the board and that has particularly hit the shares of newly public companies, The Times reported.
Instacart — legally, Maplebear Inc. — isn't pulling its IPO filing, according to the report. Instead, it's waiting for more favorable market conditions, which it doesn't expect before year's end, The Times reported.this year. Since the start of the year, the company's worth has dropped from $40 billion to $13 billion.
Instacart's decision to postpone its offering means there's no end in sight to the Bay Area's IPO drought. No local tech or tech-related company has gone public in a traditional IPO since February. Only five Bay Area companies have hit Wall Street through that process this year. The rest of the 18 companies from the region that have gone public this year did so via mergers with blank-check entitites.