Maplebear (Instacart) Signals Profitable Growth Ahead

Maplebear Inc. ((CART)) has held its Q4 earnings call. Read on for the main highlights of the call.

Instacart parent Maplebear Inc. struck an upbeat tone on its latest earnings call, highlighting the strongest gross transaction value growth in three years, robust order momentum and expanding profitability. Management balanced this optimism with candor about legal charges, rising publisher payments and a choppy advertising backdrop, but insisted that AI-driven efficiency and disciplined capital allocation keep the long-term story intact.

Marketplace Growth: GTV and Orders Reaccelerate

Q4 GTV climbed to $9.85 billion, up 14% year over year, marking the company’s fastest topline growth since before the pandemic-era peaks. Orders grew even faster at 16% to 89.5 million, signaling that Instacart is adding transactions and frequency despite a slight dip in average order value.

Profitability: EBITDA and Cash Flow Push Higher

Adjusted EBITDA rose 20% to $303 million, as Instacart continued to convert higher volumes into stronger operating leverage. Operating cash flow also increased 20% to $184 million, reinforcing the platform’s ability to fund investment and buybacks from internally generated cash rather than leaning on its balance sheet.

Capital Returns: Aggressive Buybacks, Ample Liquidity

The company leaned hard into share repurchases, buying back $1.1 billion of stock in Q4 and $1.4 billion across 2025. Even after this, Maplebear ended the year with roughly $1 billion in cash and similar liquid assets, plus $671 million of remaining buyback authorization, signaling confidence in its valuation and future cash generation.

Advertising Engine: Growing Revenue and Brand Base

Advertising and other revenue rose 10% in Q4, supported by an expanding advertiser base that now tops 9,000 brands compared with 7,000 a year earlier. Carrot Ads, the retailer-owned network, extended its reach to more than 310 sites from 220, deepening Instacart’s role in retail media even as some large brands remain cautious amid macro uncertainty.

Enterprise and Marketplace Scale: Deep Retail Integration

Instacart’s marketplace now spans over 2,200 retail banners across roughly 100,000 locations, underlining its scale advantage. On the enterprise side, the company powers more than 380 grocery e-commerce storefronts, with accounts like Costco and Sprouts showcasing how customers adopt multiple Instacart products and expand internationally over time.

AI Productivity: Faster Builds, Leaner Engineering

Management emphasized that AI tools are materially boosting engineering output, with average productivity per engineer up nearly 40% year over year and the top 10% of engineers lifting output by around 80%. These gains are allowing new products to be built more than four times faster while improving reliability, which supports rapid iteration without ballooning headcount.

Customer Base: Strong Cohorts and Higher Retention

More than 26 million customers used Instacart in 2025, and December alone saw about 10 million unique shoppers place at least one order, a company record. The 2025 new-customer cohort generated the largest incremental GTV since 2022, and those customers are sticking around longer, as retention trends improved versus the prior year.

In-Store Tech: Caper Carts Gain Traction

Instacart’s Caper smart carts are moving beyond pilots, with thousands of commitments and deployments in nearly 100 cities across 15 states. Retailers such as Sprouts, Wegmans and Wakefern now use the technology in about 20% of their stores, and early data show shoppable display prompts adding roughly one percentage point to average basket size.

International Expansion: Leveraging Existing Tech Abroad

The company is extending its model overseas by launching Costco same-day sites in France and Spain using its existing enterprise stack. Additional efforts include pilots or rollouts with Coles in Australia and Morrisons in the U.K., reflecting a strategy of exporting proven technology rather than building country-specific platforms from scratch.

Instacart+ Membership: Driving Majority of Volume

Instacart+ members now account for the majority of GTV and orders, and the paid subscriber base continues to expand. With higher engagement and better retention than nonmembers, the program got another boost when Instacart lowered the $0 delivery minimum to $10, encouraging smaller, more frequent baskets and new use cases.

GAAP Earnings: One-Time Legal Costs Weigh on Net Income

Despite strong operational metrics, GAAP net income in Q4 fell 46% year over year to $81 million, pressured by higher general and administrative expenses tied to nonrecurring legal and regulatory matters. These included a sizeable regulatory settlement that management framed as largely behind the company, though it temporarily distorted bottom-line growth.

Cost of Revenue: Publisher Payments Pinch Margins

The advertising build-out is driving higher payments to publishers, including partners in the Carrot Ads ecosystem and ad budgets managed on behalf of brands. These payments pushed up cost of revenue during 2025, but management expects the pace of growth to ease in 2026, suggesting some margin relief as the ad model scales.

Order Mix: Slight Decline in Average Ticket

Average order value slipped 1% in Q4, a move the company connected to rapid growth in restaurant orders, which typically come with smaller baskets than weekly grocery trips. While the mix shift trims ticket size, it supports higher order frequency and broadens Instacart’s relevance across more everyday occasions.

Advertising Backdrop: Macro Caution at Big Brands

Executives noted that some large brand advertisers are still cautious amid macro uncertainty, tempering portions of ad demand. Even so, overall ad performance exceeded expectations, and the expanding base of 9,000-plus brands helped offset pockets of weakness among more budget-sensitive marketers.

Profit Trajectory: EBITDA Growth to Moderate

Instacart reiterated that adjusted EBITDA should continue to grow faster than GTV in 2026, but at a slower expansion rate than in 2025. The company plans to reinvest in growth initiatives and is lapping earlier efficiency gains, implying investors should expect continued profit growth but with a more measured step-up in margins.

Early-Stage Initiatives: Off-Platform Ads and AI Agents

Off-platform advertising and data products remain small contributors, with Instacart still in early innings of testing external integrations and AI-driven consumer experiences. Management is optimistic about their longer-term monetization potential, but stressed that these channels are nascent and not yet material to overall revenue or profit.

Competition: Big Tech and Delivery Rivals Loom

The company acknowledged intensifying competition from Amazon, DoorDash and others extending same-day and grocery delivery services, calling it an ongoing risk. So far, management says the impact on Instacart’s performance has been limited, but it remains alert to how rival moves could influence retailer partnerships and shopper behavior.

Guidance: Double-Digit Growth with Disciplined Profits

For Q1 2026, Instacart guided GTV to $10.25 billion to $10.275 billion, implying 11% to 13% growth, with ad and other revenue up 11% to 14% and adjusted EBITDA of $280 million to $290 million, 15% to 19% higher year over year. For the full year, management expects EBITDA to grow faster than GTV even as it moderates the expansion rate and anticipates slower growth in publisher payments.

Maplebear’s call painted a picture of a platform still gaining scale, monetizing its advertising and enterprise tools and returning cash aggressively to shareholders while absorbing one-off hits to GAAP earnings. With AI-driven productivity, a sticky membership base and a clear profitability focus, the company is signaling steady, if more measured, upside as it navigates macro jitters and formidable competition.