Instacart Is Raising North Of $100 Million At A $2 Billion Valuation

Instacart, the home grocery delivery service that launched back in 2012, is close to raising a massive Series C round of funding north of $100 million, according to sources. The raise will value the startup at $2 billion, or more than quadruple the $400 million valuation of its Series B financing from June.

Including this round, Instacart has raised a total of $154.8 million with other investors that include Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Khosla Ventures, Canaan Partners, Y Combinator boss Sam Altman and Box founder Aaron Levie.

We’re still working on verifying the lead investor, but at this time, sources indicate that Kleiner Perkins is in the driver’s seat. We heard rumors that KPCB took a look at Instacart during its last fund raise, which was led by Andreessen Horowitz instead.

Instacart launched two years ago to become the Uber of grocery delivery. Users choose a grocery store, shop for items, and get on-demand delivery of those items within an hour, either from their phones or the company’s website.

It’s an idea that has caught on with consumers, and Instacart has been growing rapidly over the last year. As of June 2014, Instacart was operational in 10 cities across the United States, showing 15x revenue growth. Given two huge cash infusions and the spiked valuation, it’s fair to imagine it will continue to grow aggressively.

But so does the competitive landscape.

A number of services offer an alternative to Instacart, though the SF-based startup does seem to have the lead with regards to newer companies.

FreshDirect has been around for quite some time, though doesn’t offer the same immediacy as Instacart. Meanwhile, everything-on-demand services like WunWun function rather well as an instant grocery delivery service. Plus, Amazon is throwing its hat into the ring with AmazonFresh, which has already launched in a few big markets.

That said, investors have been pouring a huge amount of funding into startups showing high growth. The biggest is Uber, which just announced it closed an additional $1.2 billion in funding at a $40 billion valuation. Stripe also raised $70 million in a recent deal that values it at $3.5 billion.

We reached out to Instacart and Kleiner Perkins, but haven’t heard anything back at the time of publishing. We’ll update you if we do.

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the document

Clip & Convert Your Video Faster With Quicktime X & The New Handbrake 64-bit [Mac]

Recently a friend of mine asked for my help to find a video of a good presentation to be shown to one of his classes. He also requested for it to be iPod friendly as he would also distribute the video to his students. Three things came to my mind: Steve Jobs, Quicktime and Handbrake . Mr. Jobs is well known for his great presentations which are often used as references. I have several Apple Keynotes videos. For my friend, I decided to choose the one that introduced MacBook Air – the one that never fails to deliver the wow effect to the non-techie audience. It’s a part of January 2008 Macworld Keynote. First step: The Cutting To get only a specific part of the Keynote, I clipped the 1+ hour video into about 20 minutes using Quicktime X (which comes with Snow Leopard). I opened the movie using Quicktime X and chose Trim from the Edit menu ( Command + T ). Then I chose the start and end of my clip by moving both edges of the trimming bar to the desired position. To increase th

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a

Kiran Upadhyay

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