San Francisco startup Instacart is launching same-day grocery delivery in Chicago, allowing residents in 13 city neighborhoods to get items from Trader Joe’s and other stores brought to their doorsteps.
Chicago represents one of 10 cities where Instacart is planning to set up operations by the end of next year. Founded last summer by Apoorva Mehta, a former supply chain engineer at Amazon, the company has raised $8.5 million in venture capital to expand beyond its home base of San Francisco. Mehta said he liked that Chicagoans are already well-versed in using grocery delivery services, thanks to incumbents such as Skokie-based Web grocer Peapod, which was founded in 1989 and is now a unit of Dutch supermarket company Ahold.
“One of the main reasons why we launched in Chicago was because there was so much competition,” said Mehta, Instacart’s chief executive. “Competition, to us, is a huge indicator that there is demand for a service like this…We saw this as a positive signal.”
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