Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Instacart Second Quarter 2026 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode.
After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press 11 again.
Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. Would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Rebecca Yoshiyama, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator, and welcome, everyone, to Instacart's second quarter 2026 earnings call. On the call with me today are Chris Rogers, our Chief Executive Officer and Emily Reuter, our Chief Financial Officer. During today's call, we will make forward-looking statements related to our business plans and strategy, developments in the grocery industry, and our future performance and prospects, including our expectations regarding our financial results, and share repurchases.
These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. You can find more information about these risks and uncertainties in our SEC filings, Including our most recently filed Form 10-Ks or Form 10-Q. We assume no obligation to update these statements after today's call except as required by law. In addition, we will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures.
Have limitations and should not be considered in isolation from, or as a substitute for our GAAP results. A reconciliation between these GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures is included in our press release. Which can be found on our Investor Relations website.
Now I will turn the call over to Chris for his opening remarks.
Thanks, Rebecca. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us. Our business is performing incredibly well.
We have meaningfully accelerated our growth over the past three quarters, including a strong Q2 performance, we grew GTV 14% year-over-year, We also increased total revenue by 14%, driven by a stronger than expected advertising and other revenue performance, which grew 16% and again outpaced GTV growth. At the same time, we expanded Adjusted EBITDA and operating cash flow year-over-year reflecting our continued focus on driving profitability while reinvesting for growth. These results reflect broad-based momentum across our business.
We are continuing to improve the customer experience on our leading online grocery marketplace, accelerate adoption of our enterprise technologies with retailers, and expand the breadth and depth of our advertising ecosystem. That momentum is showing up in our customer base. Over the past three quarters, we have activated net new customers at our fastest year-over-year growth rates since 2022, helping drive strong monthly customer growth while we have continued to deepen customer engagement.
With that, let me walk you through how we are executing across our growth engines. Starting with our marketplace. Our fundamentals remain strong because we are relentlessly focused on delivering the best end to end grocery experience. one of our biggest advantages is our data.
We completed more than 1.6 billion lifetime orders, built a catalog of over two billion products, and operate at a scale where our shopper network visits large formats stores an average of more than 15 times a day. Every day, we generate more than 10 million inventory signals that help us understand what is actually available on store shelves in real-time. Every order placed, item picked, and substitution completed makes that understanding even stronger.
That gives us a structural advantage that is incredibly difficult to replicate and it allows us to build better grocery experiences with every order. We are using that advantage to continuously improve order quality. Which we know is one of the most important drivers of repeat customer behavior.
In Q2, we improved both our found rate and perfect order fill rate year-over-year for the 16th consecutive quarter. Building on that momentum with new capabilities that make shopping more personalized and orders even more accurate. This quarter, we began testing personalized health tags and nutrition scores which help customers discover products that better match their dietary preferences.
Customers will start seeing simple indicators that identify products aligned with their nutritional preferences and make it easier to compare options while they shop. We are also making replacements more personalized with a new model that better incorporates customers' dietary preferences. So if a customer's preferred product is out of stock, we are much more likely to recommend a relevant replacement such as gluten free, low sugar, or allergen free.
Beyond improving today's customer experience, we are continuing to invest in what we believe is one of Instacart's biggest advantages, inventory intelligence, In July, we acquired Arpalus, whose computer vision technology turns a quick video scan into a highly accurate view of what is actually on the shelf. By combining Arpalus's technology with our operating model and network of approximately 600 thousand shoppers, we expect to drive additional fulfillment efficiency enable more relevant AI-powered shopping experiences, and further strengthen our inventory intelligence. Our data advantage is helping us build the gold standard in Agentic grocery shopping.
Our AI assistant does not simply recommend recipes or generic product pairings. It understands the customer's preferences. Recent purchase history, what is actually available at nearby stores, and current promotion.
It then turns those insights into an order that is ready to be placed and delivered in as fast as an hour. Customers are already using our AI system to quickly restock their essentials, find deals and discounts, order ingredients from recipe suggestions, discover new products, and plan meals. Orders placed with our AI system are, on average, larger than our typical basket, that is especially notable given our industry leading average order value of $115.
We are excited to build on this momentum and launch our AI assistant across our marketplace in North America. Over the next several weeks. We remain focused on affordability which we know is one of our biggest opportunities to accelerate online grocery adoption.
Retailers that offer no markups on item prices continue to drive faster growth and stronger customer retention. Instacart already has more retailers offering online grocery delivery with no markups, than any other third-party marketplace in North America, and we are continuing to extend that advantage. Grocery Outlet is eliminating markups nationwide across our marketplace.
Alongside regional favorites like Strack & Van Til and Super King markets. New partners, including Ace Hardware, Calgary Co-op, Tractor Supply Company, and World Market are also launching with no markups right out of the gate. The same scale and innovation that powers our marketplace also makes us a trusted technology partner for retailers' owned and operated channels.
Retailers increasingly choose Instacart because we have already solved the hardest problems in online grocery. We bring those capabilities together in one connected platform spanning e-commerce, fulfillment, in-store, retail media, and AI, while keeping retailers' brands, customer relationships, and data their own. Our enterprise platform continues to be led by our e-commerce storefront solution, which powers more than 380 grocery sites and helps retailers drive incremental growth and stronger customer engagement.
Recently, we launched Storefront Pro with new partners like Calgary Co-op, Dierbergs, and more. And all these Q1 launches on Storefront Pro in the U.S. are already performing ahead of our expectations. We are bringing that same innovation into retailers' physical stores, where most grocery shopping still happens.
Caper, our AI-powered smart cart, continues to scale with both new and existing partners including Weis Markets and Wegmans in the U.S., and now Morrisons in the U.K. We are also seeing strong momentum with FoodStorm, our order management system for retailers, catering prepared foods, deli, and bakery departments. These perimeter sales are an important source of customer loyalty and they drive high-margin revenue for retailers. Recently, Costco launched FoodStorm powered online ordering and delivery for custom cakes and party platters nationwide.
Digitizing an experience that was previously available only in the warehouse. We also signed Big Y for a chain-wide rollout of online catering and in-store shelf ordering kiosks. While Sprouts is expected to launch in-store kiosks across its California locations later this year.
As part of our enterprise offering, we are taking the AI technology that we have built on our marketplace, and we are offering it to retailers. In Q2, we signed new AI solution partners, including Stew Leonard's, The Save Mart Companies, and Woodman's. Each signed for Agentic Analytics, our solution that transforms a retailer's own data into instant actionable insights.
These three retailers, in addition to Harmon's, also signed for our white-label AI assistant. We are also expanding our enterprise platform internationally. beyond North America. Earlier this year, we launched Storefront Pro with Costco in France and Spain, which continues to perform well.
Instaleap, which we acquired in Q2, is expanding our international reach and recently signed a new picking technology partnership with Morrisons, one of the United Kingdom's largest supermarket chains. All of this growth across marketplace and enterprise strengthens our advertising and data offering. Our strategy to diversify both supply and demand across our ecosystem continues to gain momentum.
And in Q2, advertising and other revenue grew 16% year-over-year, once again outpacing GTV growth. Our marketplace and network of Carrot Ads partners continues to grow, as more ecommerce platforms turn to Instacart to power their retail media. This gives brands a simpler way to reach high-intent grocery customers across more retailers at a time when they are looking to manage fewer retail media networks.
That attracts more brands to Instacart, encourages existing partners to invest more, and creates a stronger, more resilient advertising ecosystem. We continue to add new optimization tools to help advertisers achieve more of their goals. We recently rolled out AI-powered recommendations and ad manager to all advertisers helping them improve performance through campaign and creative recommendations, In Q2, we began testing our grow objective, which helps brands increase customer lifetime value by driving more repeat purchases and we expanded our acquire objective to display ads.
Helping brands reach more new customers. We are also introducing new ad formats that give brands more ways to engage customers. Our new Immersive Feed brings the kind of recipe and meal inspiration customers already enjoy on other platforms to Instacart in a shoppable vertical video format that helps brands drive discovery, engagement, and incremental reach.
Finally, we are extending the value of Instacart's first-party data beyond our own platform. Brands increasingly want to use our insights wherever they already buy media. And our collaboration with Pinterest is a great example.
In Q2, we made our Pinterest self-service offering available to all CPG partners allowing advertisers to use Instacart audiences and closed-loop measurement and campaigns that they buy through Pinterest. Overall, excited by the momentum that we are driving across our business. As the leading grocery technology platform in a massive and still underpenetrated category, we continue to see a tremendous opportunity to attract more customers, retailers, brands, and shoppers to Instacart.
Customers come to us for a shopping experience that continues to get better through more selection, quality, affordability, and convenience. Retailers choose us for a technology that helps them grow on Instacart and on their own digital channels. And in their stores.
Brands value our scaled full-funnel advertising ecosystem that delivers measurable results. And shoppers turn to Instacart for flexible earning opportunities. Each part of our platform strengthens the others, that is what makes Instacart unique, and it is what gives us further confidence in our ability to drive durable, profitable growth over the long-term.
With that, I will turn it over to Emily to walk through the financials.
Thank you, Chris. Hello, everyone. We delivered strong Q2 results.
Reflecting broad-based strength across our platform and our operating model. In Q2, GTV was $10.35 billion, up 14% year-over-year. Primarily driven by orders of 90.3 million, up 9% year-over-year.
As expected, GTV growth outpaced orders growth, with orders growth performing in line with our expectations. Primarily driven by growth in monthly customers. Average order value of $115 was up 4% year-over-year.
Reflecting the ongoing deepening of customer engagement across our platform and strong performance from club retailers, which tend to have larger AOVs. Transaction revenue was $746 million, up 13% year-over-year. Representing 7.2% of GTV compared to 7.3% in Q2 2025.
The slight year-over-year decrease as a percent of GTV was primarily driven by lower payment revenue. Offset by an increase in fulfillment efficiency. As a reminder, because we manage multiple levers across our P&L, we expect that transaction revenue as a percent of GTV may fluctuate from quarter to quarter.
Advertising and other revenue was $297 million, up 16% year-over-year, outpacing GTV growth and driving our advertising and other investment rate to 2.9%. Up from 2.8% in Q2 2025. This outperformance in Q2 was driven by broad-based strength across large mid market and emerging brands.
And was especially pronounced towards the end of the quarter alongside the World Cup. Total revenue was $1.04 billion. Up 14% year-over-year, primarily driven by GTV growth.
GAAP gross profit was $751 million, up 11% year-over-year. Representing 7.3% of GTV compared to 7.5% in Q2 2025. The year-over-year decrease in GAAP gross profit as a percent of GTV was primarily driven by an increase in cost of revenue, as payments to publishers had scaled as we expanded certain Carrot Ads and off platform partnerships.
As a reminder, we expect year-over-year growth in payments to publishers to moderate in 2026 compared to 2025. GAAP total operating expenses were $608 million, representing 5.9% of GTV, compared to 6.1% of GTV in Q2 2025. Adjusted total operating expenses, which exclude the impact of stock based compensation expense, and certain other expenses, were $468 million and represented 4.5% of GTV compared to 4.8% of GTV in Q2 2025.
The year-over-year improvement in both GAAP and adjusted total operating expenses reflects our continued focus on driving efficiencies reinvesting in growth initiatives. GAAP net income was $111 million, down 4% year-over-year. This was primarily driven by an increase in stock based compensation reflecting the year-over-year impact of shifting our first quarterly vesting date for our annual equity refresh grants from August to May.
Adjusted EBITDA was $313 million, up 19% year-over-year. We also generated operating cash flow of $493 million, up 143% year-over-year and free cash flow of $480 million, up 156% year-over-year. Primarily driven by a large accounts receivable balance collected in Q2 2026, as well as higher receivables outstanding in the prior year period.
In Q2, we repurchased $325 million of shares and ended the quarter with $998 million of remaining buyback capacity. We remain well on track to return the majority of free cash flow via repurchases this year, and closed Q2 with $1 billion in cash and similar assets. Now, on to our Q3 outlook.
I want to start with a few points to keep in mind when it comes to our updated GTV and Adjusted EBITDA guidance philosophy. First, our guidance continues to reflect the most up-to-date data available at the time we report earnings. That has not changed neither has how we run the business.
Second, starting with our Q3 2026 outlook, we have widened our GTV and Adjusted EBITDA guidance ranges to reflect our increased operating scale. Third, while we have beaten the high end of our guidance ranges in the past, going forward, we expect to land within the GTV and Adjusted EBITDA guidance ranges we provide. With the midpoint being our best estimate of where we expect to land.
With that in mind for Q3 2026, we anticipate GTV of $10.3 billion to $10.55 billion representing $10.425 billion and year-over-year growth of 14% at the midpoint. We continue to expect GTV to outpace orders growth. We also anticipate Adjusted EBITDA of $320 million to $340 million representing $330 million and year-over-year growth of 19% at the midpoint.
For advertising and other revenue, in Q3, we expect to grow 15% to 18% year-over-year. Once again outpacing our anticipated GTV growth. And reflecting broad-based strength across our ads ecosystem.
For the full year, we continue to expect Adjusted EBITDA to grow faster than GTV year-over-year, while moderating its rate of expansion as we reinvest to accelerate across our multiple growth engines and lap some of the more significant operating expense efficiencies realized in 2024 and 2025. Overall, we delivered strong Q2 results and are building on the momentum as we enter Q3. Our operating fundamentals are strong, and we are well positioned to continue driving long-term profitable growth shareholder value.
With that, we will open up the call for live questions. Operator, you may begin. Question-and-Answer Session
Thank you. At this time, we will conduct question-and-answer session. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press 11 on your telephone, and wait for your name to be announced.
To withdraw your question, please press 11 again. In the interest of time, we do kindly ask that you please limit yourself to one question at this time. And our first question will come from Nikhil Devnani from Bernstein.
Your line is open.
Hi, there. Thank you for taking the question. I wanted to ask about GTV growth.
So you grew about 14% in Q2 and at the upper end of your guidance ranges, it points to a little bit of acceleration potential for the business. Would love to just hear what you are seeing in terms of the underlying drivers of this momentum what is getting better, And then as you step back, given we really seem to be at a moment for grocery ecommerce adoption, How durable do you think this general trend of acceleration and strength can be as you look out over a multi quarter period? Thank you.
Hi, Nikhil. it is Chris. Thanks for the question. Let me unpack our growth drivers and the strength that we are seeing, and that should help illustrate why I am so confident in our ability to drive durable, profitable growth into the future.
As I said in my opening statement, our business is performing incredibly well. We have meaningfully accelerated our growth over the past three quarters, including in Q2 with 14% GTV growth. We keep delivering quarter after quarter, are executing very well.
We are seeing ongoing strength across marketplace and enterprise. And what is driving that is straightforward. We are attracting more customers and we are giving them more reasons to come back to Instacart.
Over the past three quarters, we have activated net new customers at our fastest year-over-year growth rate since 2022, And that is helping us drive strong monthly customer growth while we are continuing to also deepen customer engagement. Our marketplace fundamentals are very strong. it is clear that data is one of our biggest advantages, and we are using that advantage to make our core grocery experience better every single quarter, whether that is with order accuracy or with personalization, affordability, new agentic shopping experiences. AI is already helping to improve the customer experience.
And all of that innovation and technology extends to our enterprise platform where retailers are choosing Instacart for our purpose built grocery technology. So as I mentioned, we launched Storefront Pro with Calgary Co-op. We launched Dierberg's, Aldi in the U.S. is already exceeding our expectations following the launch that we had last quarter.
And we are signing more retailers for AI solutions, including Save Mart, Stew Leonard's, Woodman's, Agentic analytics and for our white-label AI assistant. So when you take a step back, we are very pleased with the momentum that we are seeing across the platform. And we believe that we are positioned very well for Q3, where we have guided to 14% growth at the midpoint.
Thank you.
Our next question will come from Eric Sheridan from Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.
Maybe coming back to your remarks on the enterprise Chris, if you could just go a little bit deeper on how the enterprise offering is changing your nature, the nature of your relationship with the industry. Broadly? And how what do you think that means for both the supply side and growing a wide array of supply in the next couple of years?
And how do you also think about the extension of the enterprise strategy leading more monetization from the industry as well? Thanks so much.
Yes. Thanks, Eric. I will start with the enterprise strategy and what we are what we are building and then Emily can jump in on the margin side.
So look, overall, we continue to believe enterprise is playing a highly strategic role for us with retailers. And in our ability to deliver the best customer experience across multiple surfaces. And there is a few reasons why enterprise is such a differentiator for us.
First of all, enterprise is enabling these much deeper retail relationships where we are truly partnering and innovating together with retailers. And we are engaging in short and long-term planning, and we are developing joint road maps. And these relationships are ultimately unlocking a far superior customer experience across their owned and operated websites as well as on our marketplace.
Because of the collaboration and because of the depth of technical integrations that would not have existed otherwise. And for us, enterprise is driving overall efficiency across the platform. We are able to extend marketplace innovation to our enterprise clients, and that is lowering our cost to serve because of the shared infrastructure. it is also allowing us to reinvest back into shared technology that benefits both of us.
And, of course, the enterprise business comes with increased order volume and increased density, which also helps us on the cost side. So enterprise is a very exciting growth factor for us, but it is also highly strategic, and it is part of a bigger picture of what we are building.
Hey, Eric. Thanks for the question. As it relates to monetization of enterprise, I think the way we think about it is, you know, we have a broad portfolio of products and services that really work together when it comes to our retailer relationship, and then ultimately drive revenue and profit for us.
So on the GTV side, Marketplace and Enterprise businesses really reinforce each other. We have talked about this in the past where marketplace technology extends to enterprise, which also enables us to scale fulfillment costs, which obviously benefits both sides of the ecosystem. And then you layer things like ads on top of that, and it scales across both sides of our business.
And so as marketplace and enterprise grow, so does our ability to monetize through advertising. And so the more services we add, like Carrot Ads, the more supply we and that creates more demand from the brands that we serve. And so that interdependence, I think, is really, really important to think about.
Over the long-term, we also talk about continuing to expand our portfolio of products. And that is where you think about elements that Chris touched on earlier, like FoodStorm, expanding into the perimeter of retailers, and AI solutions. Which is early but starting to gain traction with a number of major retailers.
So hopefully, gives a sense for how we think about long-term monetization of enterprise. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Bernie McTernan from BMO Capital Markets. Great.
Thanks. You became Google's first grocery partner for Gemini integration and AI mode shopping functionality. How should we think about the strategic and financial implications of this partnership?
Including customer acquisition, engagement and potential monetization opportunities? Thanks.
Yeah. Thanks, Bernie. So look.
Our strategy-- our strategy when it comes to third-party platforms like Gemini is to be wherever customers want to shop while continuing to build the very best AI grocery experience directly on Instacart. And so it is very-- it is very early what you are citing with Gemini but we view it as an incremental demand channel in a very large and underpenetrated category. So we think that there is potential for these types of integrations to grow the category over time.
And then by co creating the grocery experience, with these partners, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini, we are giving customers more ways to discover and shop on Instacart, which we believe can help accelerate this adoption over the short and long-term. So that is how we are thinking about the partnership. You know, it is still very early days with all of these with all of these partnerships.
And so there is nothing kind of material to speak of in the short term, but we are thinking of them as demand generation channels in the short and long-term. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Colin Sebastian from Baird. Your line is open.
Thanks. Good afternoon. Chris, maybe a follow-up on Enterprise.
I am curious if increasing digital competition in the grocery sector is having an impact on your pipeline there. And relatedly, how the international enterprise adoption is tracking against expectations And then, Emily, on the widened, guidance range, I mean, I just want to make sure I understand. Is that added conservatism?
Is that higher variability or a shift in how you want The Street to sort of interpret guidance? Thanks.
Yeah. Thanks, Colin. On the first part, yes.
I would say that increased digital first competition is helping to rally retailers around North America and around the world to continue to invest in their own capabilities. I think at this point, e-commerce at a high quality with a high quality customer service element is table stakes, for retailers. And it is a complex it is a complex thing to build on your own.
And so many retailers are turning to us, and that is why you are seeing so much traction. Internationally, I would say I continue to be very encouraged by the opportunity to bring that same tech to retailers outside of North America. This is also still early days, but we do believe international represents an exciting long-term growth opportunity for us.
And on the one hand, we are very ambitious in our plans. And on the other hand, we are approaching that opportunity with quite a bit of discipline. We are leading with our enterprise suite.
We are deploying products that have already been proven retailers in North America. We are not building net new, highly custom solutions for retailers in new markets. So we are deploying solutions like Storefront Pro and our Caper carts and FoodStorm to address the challenges that are common across all grocery retailer.
And that is what gives us really high confidence that our tech is going to translate very well internationally as we move into those markets.
Great. And on the guidance range, thanks for the question. You know, think this 1's fairly straightforward.
Our scale has increased very meaningfully since we went public. And so when we think about just the range on a percentage basis and we look at our peers and sort of what is normal in the market, you know, I think we had sort of outgrown the range that we came public with several years ago. So it was an opportunity to write size the range relative to our current operating scale.
Then at the same time, we were widening the range. It was just an opportunity for us to revisit guidance philosophy. And that is what you are seeing in terms of the points highlighted earlier, which is while we have beaten the high end of the range in the past, going forward, our expectation is to land within the range with the midpoint as our best estimate.
And of course, as always, our guidance does reflect everything we are seeing in the market to date. And try to give you our best understanding of how we think we can land the quarter. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Jason Helfstein from Oppenheimer.
Thanks. Again, sorry to harp on Enterprise, but I think that is something that we are all pretty excited about. So when you think about it, you know, enterprise revenue plus advertising, we put that as a bucket.
You know, do we think, like, over time, just because you have not quantified that within transactions, could that become the majority of the business? And then ultimately, you know, we kind of look at this as, again, more of a platform play where I think initially people have looked at the business kind of more on the shopper side. And then just second, any help with, Emily, how we can think of advertising as a percent of GTV next year?
Been pretty consistent. and could we actually start to see a breakout as a percent of GTV? Thanks.
Thanks, Jason. I will take the first part of the question. As it relates to enterprise and kind of the percentage of business.
Look, as we have said in the past, we operate both our marketplace and our enterprise as one fully integrated platform. So both marketplace and enterprise are growing. Marketplace and enterprise are generating profit dollars for us.
But importantly, as Emily said earlier, they reinforce each other in so many ways in terms of strength and key differentiators. And because of this and because each retailer that sits on both marketplace and enterprise is unique in their offerings and the tools that they use from Instacart we look at everything holistically. So the success of our enterprise strategy is really showing up throughout our total company reported metrics.
Give you a little bit more color on why these reinforce each other so strongly is there is a very clear value loop. We take all of the technology that building on Marketplace. We put that in the hands of retailers our enterprise offering.
And our deep enterprise relationships allow us to launch more services and integrations retailers that benefit us back on Marketplace. And also having both Marketplace and Enterprise platforms allows us to reach more customers, and therefore, we get the order benefit the order density benefit. We get, greater shopping efficiencies.
Also touched on advertising. The advertising ecosystem allows CPGs to reach customers on both marketplace where consumers are shopping and on a retailer's storefront. So you can see how all of these pieces are highly intertwined Every enhancement that we make on our marketplace benefits enterprise, benefits ads, and kind of vice versa.
Because we manage this as one integrated portfolio, we are really able to balance investments. We are able to lean into the highest ROI opportunities and reinvest efficiencies back into the platform, all of which supports our commitment to drive overall growth and profitability progression.
Yeah. And on the ads question, you know, appreciate the question recognizing, I think, the strength of our ads and other business that we have been able to execute for the last several quarters. So really nice to see the acceleration in the business there and the broad-based strength that we are seeing across large, midsize and emerging brands.
So we are feeling very good about what we are seeing. We are also really, really pleased to have guided to 15% to 18% ads and other growth into Q3. So a reflection of the continued underlying strength that we are seeing there.
As you know, we do not guide to beyond the next quarter. But what I can say is, of course, we have committed to long-term target ranges. And that implies continued ads and other growth that is higher than GTV growth over time.
Now it is not necessarily always linear. We have talked about that. There can be puts to takes puts and takes, sorry, over the short term.
But our expectation and ambition is to grow ads and other faster than GTV. And we are seeing a lot of the results of strategy that we have talked about over time in terms of the platform strategy extending beyond marketplace, growing our advertiser base, increasing our performance, enhancing our measurement, all of that really, really working incredibly well together. Thank you.
Our next question will come from Deepak Mathivanan from Cantor Fitzgerald. Your line is open.
Great. Thanks for taking the question. Of course, you talked about the can you talk about the adoption of AI shopping assistant?
I mean, you talked about some use cases. How are you driving customers to use the experience in customers try the assistant? What type of benefits are you seeing?
On the KPIs? And then, Emily, AOVs have now basically reached the level where it was before you launched restaurants on the platform. And also the small basket orders.
Can you give some color on what the underlying trends on AOV is? That would be helpful. Thanks so much.
Thanks, Deepak. So, yeah, absolutely. Happy to talk about our AI assistant.
We have been very pleased with the pilot. And as a result, as I mentioned, we plan to launch our AI assistant across North America over the next several weeks. Look, we strongly believe that the success we are seeing is all driven by our data advantage and what we have been able to create as a result.
Our AI assistant does not just recommend generic recipes or generic pairings. It understands a customer's preference. It understands their recent purchase history. what is actually available at a nearby store and current promotions.
And it turns all of that into an order that is ready to be placed and delivered in an hour. And that is built again on our rich data, 1.6 billion lifetime orders, two billion item product catalog, and a shopper network that is in the physical store is giving us real-time signals of what is on the shelf. And that combination is what is making that is really differentiating the AI assistant that we have built.
From a customer engagement perspective, we are seeing customers are using it to build their weekly carts. They are using it to discover new products, and they are increasingly using it to plan meals. And so for example, customers, we could see them use a prompt like, plan 4 weeknight dinners for my that my kids will eat under $150.
And then we will build a real shoppable cart using in stock items at the customer's favorite retailer. Or it could say, rebuild last week's order, but swap in something for taco night. And the results will combine their purchase history, and then we will introduce fresh new discovery ideas for that meal.
And an interesting data point that we want to highlight is that orders placed with our AI assistant are on average larger than our typical basket, which is notable because our basket is a $115 AOV, which is already industry leading. So what I will say is we are very happy with how this is progressing. We feel like we are very well positioned to deliver a very high quality agentic experience for our customers.
And on AOV, yeah, I mean, first of all, I think it is important to just acknowledge the strength of AOV. it is always been true for us that we have very high AOVs, and that really reflects our strategy, which is that we are serving the full weekly shop use case. And that is really differentiated versus others in the market that tend to tend to serve more of a fill in use case. I think that is just remained true over time.
In terms of the AOV strength that we are seeing, obviously when we had introduced restaurants and $10 minimum, back, over the last two years, we did call that out as a headwind short term headwind to AOV. But of course, we have lapped that headwind. And so when you look into what are the drivers of AOV strength today, there is a couple of things going on.
One is deepening engagement with customers. So as customers spend more time on Instacart, they spend more overtime. So that is what we are, you know, we are seeing and continuing to see.
We have also called out in the past and continue to see outperformance from club retailers. Those tend to have larger AOVs overall, and we do particularly well there. Then the other thing I would note is we do have growth from our high AOV business customers, including some of the more recent launches over the last year like Restaurant Depot that we have talked about over the last couple of quarters.
So we are really seeing strength from coming back to the core of what we do, which is ultimately meeting more of our customers grocery needs. Thank you.
Our next question will come from Josh Beck from Raymond James. Your line is open.
Yes. Thank you for taking the question. I wanted to go back to the assistant learning.
So certainly sounds like, basket size has been a early standout. I am curious. Maybe you need, you know, more data to see this, but how are you thinking about maybe frequency and conversion?
Because it does seem like some of these shopping experiences can really get collapsed. So I am I am curious on how you are thinking about that. Then with respect to, advertising within the assistant experience, the way that I read the blog was there is not necessarily a lot of ads at the moment, but you are experimenting with a lot of different formats, you know, whether it is sponsored recipes or, you know, a few different elements.
But, how do you think maybe just about, you know, the ad monetization for, the cart assistant versus the, you know, maybe kind of non, assistant experience? Thank you.
Thanks, Josh. So look, I will start on kind of the metrics that we are seeing. But first, I will back up a little bit We do believe that AI is gonna be a meaningful growth driver for us.
And for the category, but over time. So remember, grocery shopping is uniquely complex compared to most other verticals, and it is time consuming, and it is deeply personal. And it is shaped by individual dietary needs.
And our AI assistant delivers an agentic experience that is intended to remove that friction and it is making shopping more personalized and intuitive whether customers are reordering staples or they are planning their family meals for the week. Again, we have a real advantage here because of our data and retail retailer integrations. We have the proprietary data from our 1.6 billion orders, but also from our at scale fulfillment network and our enterprise helps as well with the deep retailer integrations, which strengthens all of it.
And all of that combination what is allowing us to move from kind of a front end AI experience to actually completing the order. And that is very difficult to do at scale. So I do think that our AI is gonna be durable growth driver for online grocery.
We expect the GenSync experiences to accelerate online adoption. From a metric perspective, I do expect it is going to drive better conversion, think it is gonna drive higher retention and larger baskets and more frequent ordering. But, again, over time.
On the second question on ads, I mean, like, look. We are heavily embracing AI kind of throughout our ads offering. It is completely core to our advertising innovation at this point.
And as a result, we have rolled out several AI-powered features and tools for advertisers that are increasingly driving better results for brands while also improving the customer experience. We believe with AI, we can do both together. And I will give you a couple examples.
We rolled out AI-powered recommendations for all advertisers and ads managers, which could automatically identify ways to improve campaign performance. So for example, we recommend campaign settings as well as flags for products with missing images, which also helps on the Instacart consumer experience as well. We make brand hierarchy suggestions that unlock more accurate brand level reporting.
And recommendations that target optimize ROAS optimization. We make recommendations on how to increase due to brand coverage. Earlier this year, we also launched our new generative recommendations model.
That uses real-time context to better understand the consumer's intent. For example, previously adding milk to your cart might result in a recommendation to add cookies or cereal or sliced cheese. But now, based on additional items in your cart, like flour and eggs, we know that your probably shopping for a baking occasion.
And that tends to add more valuable suggestions like vanilla or cinnamon, which leads to higher engagement and ultimately better results for advertising. The final thing I want to highlight is we continue to use sophisticated machine learning to drive specific results for advertisers. Such as we began testing this grow objective, which is helping brands increase repeat purchase from existing customers, which improves lifetime value.
And we are also expanding our acquire objective to display ads, which helps brands reach more new to brand customers. So we are using AI throughout the entire ads experience. We are gonna keep investing here, and we are gonna we expect AI to remain a durable source of our advertising innovation going forward.
Thank you.
Our next question will come from Shweta Khajuria from Wolfe Research. Your line is open.
Thanks a lot for taking my questions. Let me try 2, please. First is on enterprise and international markets.
Could you please talk about how international markets your conversations there are different as you try and expand enterprise in the in those regions versus what you have seen here in The US and to the degree the level of investment that you may need now that you have spent maybe a little bit more time over the past few quarters. And then the second one is on price parity. Where are you with price parity today versus perhaps some of your competitors?
And is that going to be a differentiating factor as we think about it over the next, call it, three to 6 quarters? Is that gonna be an expectation? Thank you.
Thanks for the question. I will start with international. So when we are over when we are in international markets, talking about our technology, the conversations are surprisingly very similar to the conversations that we are having in North America because they are trying to solve all of the same problems.
How do you how do you scale you know, an ecommerce platform? How do you fulfill at scale? How do you have really rich sources of, recommendations?
Suggestions? How do you manage cart and checkout? Retailers are looking for an end to end experience that just works together.
And what we are finding is that the solutions that we have been building for years in North America are highly applicable to the to retailers around the world. I would also like to point out that we made an acquisition with Instaleap, which is giving us more reach these international markets and has solved some problems for retailers that are perhaps a little bit more unique to international markets, like serving multiple marketplaces with fulfillment technology. So we have been leaning into continue to expand those conversations that we are having with retailers.
I will say we are already seeing positive signals. Our storefront pro launches with Costco in France and Spain have continued to perform ahead of our expectations, reinforcing our confidence in the overall strategy and so, again, we are in early stages, but we like the progress that we are seeing. And we do believe that our enterprise first approach is going to set us up well to expand there over time.
On your second question, which was on price parity, so first of all, I want to be very clear. So retailers are setting item level prices on our marketplace. And on their owned and operated sites that we power And some retailers choose to mark up prices to help offset the fees that we charge.
And some may choose you know, not to mark up the prices. That said, what we are seeing is that customers are seeking value, and they are gravitating towards reaching who do not markup. And so a result, we are seeing these retailers consistently grow faster and retain customers better on our platform over time.
And the data that we shared on this in the past is clear. Non markup retailers grow more than 10 points faster on average and they retain better. And therefore, we think eliminating markups is a very clear mechanism for retailers to drive incremental sales, especially as they are competing against other retailers for share of sales, including large digital first retailers who they are competing against.
So our approach has been that we are working very closely with our retail partners to ensure that they understand the data and they understand the insights in the business case for them But to be clear, you know, the cost to move to non markup is theirs to bear. So it is a business decision. For the retailers.
I will point out that, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, we have more retailers that do not mark up relative to other third-party marketplaces, and so we are already a leader in this space. Thank you.
Our next question will come from Andrew Boone from Citizens. Your line is open.
Chris, I wanted to go back to the fastest new customer adds that you guys have seen sounds like year to date. Can you just unpack that? what is different you guys are doing now, or is there something else where you guys are converting better? Just help us understand that.
And then the R plus sorry if I am mispronouncing that, acquisition you guys made? Can you help us understand the benefit of having better in-store data? That seems like something you guys have always had This feels like a step function unlock.
What does that do for you guys? Or what else can you guys really unlock, whether that is monetization or operations from that? Thank you so much.
Thank you for the question. I will start with the new customer acquisition. Look, my perspective is that this is all a result of us prioritizing all of the right things.
Internally, the things that we know really matter to customers. We are giving the customer more personalization. So that they feel like we really know them when they come to Instacart, and we can anticipate their needs and that is including things like health and nutrition tags that really matter to consumers.
And as part of that, we are giving them an incredible agentic experience. one that understands the customer's intent for their shopping trip and helps drive discovery and helps them build their basket and plan their meals. We are also constantly delivering higher order quality, building on the 16 consecutive quarters of improvement of both, found rate and perfect order fill rate. We are helping to earn customers' trust by delivering a higher quality experience quarter after quarter.
And we are also prioritizing affordability, which we know is deeply important to families We are helping to bring their costs down with very important initiatives like loyalty programs and weekly deals and as I just spoke about, by working with retailers to bring down their markups. And so when it comes to innovation and where we are investing and the things that we are working on internally, we are not standing still at all. You know, combining that with the fact that we are already a category leader and the category is already dramatically is dramatically underpenetrated, it gives me the confidence in our path forward and our ability to attract customers to our platform.
On your second question, which I believe was Arpalus. So look. I think first of all, Arpalus is a great example of our M&A philosophy in action.
We look for technologies and capabilities that complement our existing and strategy. And accelerate our growth in a in a disciplined way. In this case, acquiring Arpalus directly supports one of our biggest priorities, which is delivering the highest quality grocery experience.
And quality is already a key differentiator, for as I just mentioned. And now, with Arpalus' computer vision technology, it is going complement all the investments that we are making then we are going to put it in the hands of our more than 600 thousand shoppers, and we are gonna have better tools to identify products on the actual shelf. And that will help us improve things like our fulfillment accuracy.
So I expect Arpalus is going to help us drive fulfillment efficiency. I think it is going to enable us to provide more relevant AI-powered shopping experiences for consumers. Think it is gonna help us further strengthen our inventory intelligence and that is all very important for our platform and the experience that we deliver to customers.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Bernie McTernan from Needham and Company.
Great. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question.
I was wondering if you could just shed some light on the Instaleap part in The UK. It sounded like there was some, you know, picking and maybe delivery aspect to the partnership. Which I think would be a major unlock.
But I just wanna see if that is a blueprint that you can bring other markets to unlock that problem or the difficulty with the enterprise offering. Thank you.
Yeah. I mean, it is a great it is a great question. Thank you, Bernie.
Chris, yes, Look. The we are very excited about the Instacart the Instaleap, UK partnership with Morrisons. It is picking technology.
It is slightly different capabilities than what we have in our first-party offering with Instacart. It allows us to orchestrate deliveries across multiple platforms, which is something that Morrisons was looking for. But it is very strong and powerful picking technology for the retailer.
And honestly, we increasingly think that this is gonna something that we are gonna be able to scale in more markets. So we continue to be very excited about the Instaleap acquisition. Not only is it helping us expand our global footprint because they have so many retailers that they are already working with.
What we are seeing now is that the technology is resonating with retailers that they were not working with in the past. And so that gives us extra excitement about what we have do the acquisition of Instaleap. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Michael Morton from MoffettNathanson. Your line is open.
Hi, good evening. Thank you for the question. I was wondering if we could get an update on the breakdown of priority orders in the past.
You have talked about on demand and then also the orders that are 30 minute window Just we keep hearing about consumers' continual demand to increase delivery speed, and it seems to be an area in grocery that plays to your advantage. And while we are talking about things that play to your advantage, The Amazon in roads and grocery are no secret. But the SKU offering is limited, by their first-party business model.
Could you share any data from what you see your average shoppers kind of long tail distribution of inventory needs I mean, everybody has their own dietary kinda restrictions in a household. So just a better understanding of why a consumer needs 40 thousand options that is presented from a marketplace grocery versus a first-party offering like an Amazon? Thank you.
Sure. I will I will start with your question on priority orders. So we have not updated the specific percentage, and part of that is just these are decisions we are making around what is the optimal overall marketplace balance.
So you have seen us over time adjust pricing on priority as an example because, you know, at one point, I think priority was probably higher than where we thought was the appropriate levels are healthy for the ecosystem. You are trying to balance all the parts of the marketplace. So there is not necessarily sort of an up and to the right.
We are trying to get priority to a 100% because that was sort of by definition undermine the product itself. So we are constantly working on speed We think that is a core value prop, but I will get back to selection. it is speed and selection, right, and quality, and all these things need to work together. But our standard ETAs have also improved. along with priority.
And so it is sort of a composition of these things. I do not think it is sort of priority has to be at x percent for us to be successful. I think there is a happy equilibrium that we are we are constantly looking to make.
I think as it relates to your question, though, on selection, as I just said. it is this combination of speed, but the ability to execute an order in the timeframe customers want, which we know is immediate. But have everything they are looking for. Right?
So there may be some use cases where you are happy to choose from a small selection of SKUs, but there is a reason why you go into most grocery stores in The US and you see you know, every variety of dairy under the sun. And that is because people have very strong opinions and perspectives about as you said, their nutritional needs, their dietary restrictions, allergies. Just brand preferences frankly.
And we see that in our data. Right? So on average, our customers over the lifetime shop at more than 5 retailers.
And Instacart plus at more than double that. And I think that is reflective of a desire for the full inventory of options that we have in a marketplace ecosystem. So we just see it sort of time and again, selection drives demand.
And it drives demand when you are able to serve it in a time frame that meets customers' needs, which time and again we see as now or, you know, as soon as soon as possible thereafter. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Igal Arounian from Wedbush. Your line is open.
I guess just wanted to ask on the your what you are seeing outside of the core grocery, so within restaurants, retail, Express, you know, so what are the trends you are seeing there? And then, you know, given the M and A and you made some comments on it on the strategy there, but any more color on the approach and capital allocation You know, how important does it remain here? You have a few things to digest.
Chris, how much more could we expect there? Thanks.
Thanks for the question. I can start with restaurants. So, our thesis for adding restaurants to our platform has played out very well.
By adding an additional high frequency use case to our platform, we have been able to drive stronger grocery engagement. Simply said, customers who have ordered from restaurants have ordered more groceries. And that strategy, it is successful for us because it layers on top of our strong marketplace foundation, which means that we are able to optimize our marketing and our engagement strategies to drive customers to the best use case at any given time.
So at times, customers are going to want a different use case, whether that is grocery or, to your point, other retail categories and restaurants. And we are able to cater our marketing and engagement strategies accordingly to drive the best durable long-term engagement. So put together, we are seeing our entire platform deliver incredibly strong results.
And we drive monthly customer growth while we continue to deepen consumer engagement because we are able to optimize through grocery, through other retailer, and through experiences use cases like restaurants. On your second question on capital allocation, our capital allocation framework has been very consistent. We invest in the business first.
We maintain firepower for M&A. Then we opportunistically repurchase shares On M and A, you have now seen our M&A strategy in action. Our recent acquisitions are similar to what we have done in the past, which is to buy technology that makes sense to buy versus build. And accelerate our time to market.
Instaleap is a great example. Arpalus is our newest acquisition is another great example, our real-time inventory intelligence. On buybacks specifically, I will pass to Emily to speak to.
Sure. So we, you know, we have continued our buyback strategy consistent with what we have shared in the past. In Q2, we repurchased $325 million of shares.
And that really reflects our continued confidence in the business, which hopefully you saw reflected in our results today. We are well on track as we have previously committed to return the majority of free cash flow via repurchases this year. We did end the quarter with just under a billion dollars of remaining buyback capacity.
So I expect buyback to continue to be an important part of our overall capital allocation strategy. Thank you.
And we will take our last question for today from Ronald Josey from Citi.
Great. Thanks for thanks for sticking me in here. I wanted to ask two questions. one is just sort of to better understand that the demand side, Emily, I think club has been a driver of AOV for several quarters now.
And I just want to understand that a little bit more in terms of why And then, Chris, on the data side, maybe asking you a little bit differently than what we have been asked before. But you know, the two billion products, the tens of millions of inventory signal that Instacart gets today, Would love to hear how your grocer partners think of Instacart from a differentiation perspective relative to other-- others that are out there just given your size and scale? So question is on the data advantage and how your grocery partners view that.
Thank you.
Great. I can kick off on the demand side. And the question, I think, specifically was around AOV strength being driven by club in particular and why.
So I think there is a couple of different things going on here. One, there is some macro component here. But I would maybe frame it more as consumers seeking value.
Right? So we know that club retailers and you see this in the performance of club retailers broadly in the ecosystem, not just in online. Are performing really well.
So customers are looking for value. And online or offline, but in our case, both on our marketplace, but also on our third-party SFP sites. We are seeing a lot of strength within the club ecosystem.
And the second piece of it, specific to Costco, and we talked about Costco, the strong relationship we have there, we did launch benefit with their executive members coming up on a year ago. And that is been really successful. So that is driven some of the strength there as well.
So that is just continuing to deepen the relationship with Costco, but also with folks that are looking for that additional value. So overall, those are a couple of the things that we are seeing. And then generally, why is club higher AOV?
Think it is just the nature of know, what club retailers are selling, the size of the, you know, the products and the scale of that. So, yeah, you know, continuing to see strength there.
And on your second question, look, retailers think of us completely differently, and that is because we are playing a fundamentally different game here. No one else is doing what we are doing, where taking all of the innovation we are building on our marketplace and the hundreds of millions of orders that we are performing there, we are taking our learnings and our scale and we are giving it to retailers in the form of enterprise. Technology.
And, you know, so now in hundreds of cases, we are also powering their ecommerce. We are also powering their fulfillment. 380 retailers, we are powering their ad tech stack and oftentimes extending ad demand directly onto their websites. We have now forayed into AI solutions with our white-labeling the AI assistant that we have built We are building AI analytics solutions for our retailers.
And it is a very holistic partnership that allows us to be very deeply partnered with retailers, plan for the short and long-term, and innovate on both the marketplace and on their owned and operated website. So my point of view is that they think of us completely differently than other third-party marketplaces restaurant delivery marketplaces. Thank you.
This does conclude today's program. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.
Everyone, have a wonderful day.
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