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Maplebear (NASDAQ:CART) executives told investors the company closed out 2025 with its strongest gross transaction value (GTV) growth in three years, pointing to momentum across its Marketplace, enterprise technology platform, and advertising business as it heads into 2026.
On the company’s fourth-quarter 2025 earnings call, CEO Chris Rogers highlighted accelerating growth and said the company is “in a position to press our advantage,” while CFO Emily Reuter emphasized continued operating leverage and disciplined investment. Management also announced a change to its investor communications approach: beginning in Q1 2026, the company will stop publishing quarterly shareholder letters and instead move to an annual shareholder letter, while continuing quarterly earnings calls, press releases, and supplemental materials.
Fourth-quarter results: GTV growth accelerates, profitability expands
Transaction revenue rose 13% year-over-year and represented 7.1% of GTV, flat from the prior year. Reuter attributed that result to investments in affordability to drive engagement, largely offset by fulfillment efficiency gains, and said transaction revenue can fluctuate as the company reinvests in growth.
Advertising and other revenue increased 10% year-over-year and, according to management, outperformed expectations. Reuter cited strong GTV performance, more Carrot Ads partners, an increase to more than 9,000 active brand advertisers in Q4 (up from 7,000 a year earlier), and expansion in off-platform partnerships and new data solutions.
On profitability, the company reported GAAP net income of $81 million, down 46% year-over-year. Reuter said the decline was primarily due to higher general and administrative expenses related to non-recurring legal and regulatory matters, including a $60 million settlement with the FTC. She added that absent those non-recurring expenses, GAAP net income would have increased year-over-year.
Adjusted EBITDA grew 20% to $303 million, and operating cash flow was $184 million, also up 20% year-over-year.
Marketplace and enterprise: retailer count, “land and expand,” and in-store tech
Rogers said the company’s strategy centers on being a trusted consumer grocery platform, providing technology retailers rely on for omnichannel operations, and building an advertising ecosystem brands prefer. He noted that more than 2,200 retail banners across nearly 100,000 locations are accessible on the Instacart app or website, and the company has surpassed 1.6 billion lifetime orders.
Enterprise was a major focus, with Rogers describing it as a strategic advantage that enables deeper technical integrations, shared planning, and alignment with retailers. He said the company now powers more than 380 grocery e-commerce sites. In response to a question from J.P. Morgan, Rogers said enterprise creates efficiencies through greater order density, shared infrastructure, and lower cost to serve, and he highlighted international opportunity following launches with Costco in Spain and France.
Management also described enterprise relationships that deepen over time. Rogers pointed to:
- Costco: progression from marketplace/storefront to Storefront Pro, expansion to Costco business centers, additional fulfillment options like priority delivery, a benefit for Costco executive members, and same-day site launches in France and Spain.
- Sprouts: marketplace and Sprouts.com storefront, expansion to curbside pickup using Instacart picking technology, upgrade to Storefront Pro with Carrot Ads, and a push into in-store experiences such as Caper Cart and FoodStorm, with plans to launch AI solutions starting with Cart Assistant.
On in-store technology, Rogers said the company is seeing “great momentum” with Caper Cart, citing “thousands of cart commitments,” operations in nearly 100 cities across 15 states, and new pilots in the second half of 2025 with Sprouts and Wegmans, as well as Coles in Australia and Morrisons in the U.K. He also noted ongoing expansion with Wakefern, where the company is live at about 20% of stores and recently launched shoppable display ads.
Advertising, Carrot Ads expansion, and publisher payments
Management said the ads ecosystem continues to broaden across Instacart surfaces and retailer-owned sites. Rogers said Carrot Ads expanded to more than 310 retailer-owned sites, up from 220 a year earlier, and that more than 9,000 brands advertised on Instacart in Q4. He also described early tests of in-store advertising via shoppable display ads on Caper Carts, including an example prompt (“Got everything you need?”) that he said is driving nearly a 1 percentage point lift in basket size on average.
Reuter flagged a cost-of-revenue dynamic tied to the advertising business: some growth is driving higher payments to publishers, including revenue share paid to certain Carrot Ads partners for ads on their sites and budgets deployed on behalf of brands in certain off-platform partnerships. She said these costs are “intentional and incremental growth by design,” and expects year-over-year growth in publisher payments to moderate in 2026.
In Q&A, executives referenced off-platform partnerships with Meta, The Trade Desk, Google, Pinterest, and TikTok, describing them as a way to help brands reach consumers beyond Instacart while connecting activity back to purchases on the platform. Reuter added that off-platform is a smaller contributor overall than on-platform advertising, which includes ads on Instacart’s marketplace and through Carrot Ads.
AI initiatives, Cart Assistant timing, and early “agentic” shopping
Rogers repeatedly pointed to generative AI as a driver of execution velocity and efficiency. He said average output per engineer rose nearly 40% over the past year, including 10% of the team increasing output by 80%, and added that for new projects the company believes AI is enabling it to build production-grade software more than four times faster than before, while improving reliability.
On consumer-facing AI, Rogers told analysts the company is in beta testing for Cart Assistant and plans to roll it out on Instacart Marketplace by the end of Q1. He also said the company is partnering off-platform with third-party AI platforms, including OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft. Rogers noted the company was the first grocery partner to launch native checkout within ChatGPT.
While Rogers said he expects consumer behavior to shift over time, he described current referral traffic from outside platforms as “not material” yet.
Capital return and 2026 outlook
Reuter said the company repurchased $1.4 billion of shares in 2025, including $1.1 billion in Q4, which included a $250 million accelerated share repurchase program. The company ended 2025 with approximately $1 billion in cash and similar assets and $671 million of remaining buyback capacity.
For Q1 2026, Instacart guided to:
- GTV of $10.125 billion to $10.275 billion (up 11% to 13% year-over-year).
- Advertising and other revenue growth of 11% to 14% year-over-year.
- Adjusted EBITDA of $280 million to $290 million (up 15% to 19% year-over-year), with a sequential decline primarily due to advertising seasonality.
Looking to fiscal 2026, Reuter said the company remains committed to steady annual adjusted EBITDA growth that outpaces GTV growth, while noting the rate of expansion is expected to moderate as the company reinvests across its growth engines and laps operating expense efficiencies realized in 2024 and 2025.
About Maplebear (NASDAQ:CART)
Maplebear, Inc, doing business as Instacart, operates a leading online grocery and essentials marketplace that connects consumers, retail partners and personal shoppers through its digital platform. The company enables customers to order groceries, household items and specialty products for same-day or scheduled delivery, as well as in-store pickup. By integrating its technology with retailers’ existing inventory and point-of-sale systems, Maplebear streamlines the shopping experience and provides real-time availability and pricing.
Founded in 2012 and headquartered in San Francisco, Maplebear has grown from a regional startup to a publicly traded company listed on NASDAQ under the ticker CART.
