Meet man who got fed up buying groceries offline, built Rs 56600 crore company, his net worth is...

Born in Rajasthan’s Jodhpur, Apoorva Mehta left India for the African country of Libya with his parents. He then moved to Canada, one of the top places for immigrating Indians. Mehta studied engineering and then worked at companies like Amazon, Blackberry and Qualcomm before he decided to leave his job in 2010.

Wanting to become a businessman, he started around 20 ventures but tasted failure in most of them. The big idea came out of necessity for Apoorva who had no car and was fed up with having to go to stores to buy groceries in Canada’s cold by bus. It was one fateful day when he was hungry and alone in his apartment with nothing but hot sauce in his fridge. 

Thinking in his flat in San Francisco, he decided to build a grocery delivery company. Mehta’s firm, Instacart, started out of his kitchen. In early days he even delivered groceries himself in a cab as he had no car and was thin on manpower. 

Mehta made a whopping Rs 9,100 crore when Instacart saw a blockbuster initial public offering (IPO). The company expanded into the largest grocery-delivery player in the US in terms of revenue. Instacart has a network of over 80,000 retailers and over 7.7 million consumers. 

During the Covid-19 pandemic, it peaked to a valuation of $39 billion in March 2021. Just five months later, Mehta resigned as CEO and his position on the company’s board as part of the IPO. From being fed up with buying groceries offline, Mehta is a billionaire with a net worth of Rs 8,325 crore.