Apoorva Mehta is an Indian-Canadian businessman. He founded the grocery delivery company

Instacart Instacart is an American company that operates a grocery delivery and pick-up service in the United States and Canada. The company offers its services via a website and mobile app. The service allows customers to order groceries from participat ...

. In 2020, Mehta became a

billionaire A billionaire is a person with a net worth of at least 1,000,000,000, one billion (1,000,000,000, i.e., a thousand million) units of a given currency, usually of a major currency such as the United States dollar, euro, or pound sterling. The ...

at the age of 33. As of 2021, his company was valued at $39 billion.

Early life and education

Mehta was born in 1986 in India. He moved to

Libya Libya (; ar, ليبيا, Lībiyā), officially the State of Libya ( ar, دولة ليبيا, Dawlat Lībiyā), is a country in the Maghreb region in North Africa. It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Egypt to the east, Su ...

shortly after he was born, and then to

Hamilton, Ontario Hamilton is a port city in the Canadian province of Ontario. Hamilton has a population of 569,353, and its census metropolitan area, which includes Burlington and Grimsby, has a population of 785,184. The city is approximately southwest of ...

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tota ...

when he was 14. He graduated from the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a public research university with a main campus in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on of land adjacent to "Uptown" Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also operates ...

with an electrical engineering degree.

Early career

Mehta worked as a design engineer at

Blackberry The blackberry is an edible fruit produced by many species in the genus ''Rubus'' in the family Rosaceae, hybrids among these species within the subgenus ''Rubus'', and hybrids between the subgenera ''Rubus'' and ''Idaeobatus''. The taxonomy of ...

and Qualcomm before joining

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon (company), an American multinational technolog ...

in 2008. While at Amazon, he worked as a supply-chain engineer. Mehta left Amazon and moved to San Francisco in 2010. Between 2010 and 2012, he launched 20 startups, all of which failed.

Instacart

He founded

in 2012. That year, he tried to apply for funding through

Y Combinator Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, Str ...

but missed the deadline. He eventually got a meeting by sending a pack of beer to a Y Combinator partner using his grocery delivery service and was later admitted. By 2020, Mehta had become a billionaire at age 33 with a 10% stake in his company. In 2021, Instacart was valued at $39 billion. In July 2021, Mehta stepped down as CEO and is now serving as the executive chairman. Fidji Simo, former head of the Facebook app, is Instacart's new CEO. Mehta was included on ''Forbes'' 30 under 30 in 2013. In 2021, he was included on the Time 100 Next.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mehta, Apoorva 1986 births Living people Indian chief executives Indian billionaires University of Waterloo alumni