InstaShop, a hyperlocal grocery app provider founded in 2015 by two Greek partners, has been sold for a whopping $360 million dollars.
Ioanna Angelidaki co-founded InstaShop with her university colleague, John Tsioris, in 2015.
Yesterday, they announced that the grocery delivery app has been acquired by Delivery Hero, a European multinational online food-delivery service based in Berlin, Germany. The acquisition involves $270 million dollars in cash, plus an additional $90 million dollars based on InstaShop meeting certain growth targets.
Instashop.com – Sold for $360 million dollars.
InstaShop is a hyper-local marketplace app connecting users to nearby grocery outlets for fast deliveries, in UAE, Bahrain, Lebanon, Egypt, and Greece, with plans to expand globally.
Demand for InstaShop has boomed since mid-February due to the Coronavirus pandemic: Instashop app downloads increased by 70%, while existing users increased their daily orders by a 53% volume. The average order value increased by 61% during the same time frame.
So what about domain names?
Based in Dubai, InstaShop operated from the domain name InstaShop.ae – the ccTLD for United Arab Emirates – since 2015.
The company became the registrant on record of the domain InstaShop.com in late 2017, although WHOIS records from DomainTools indicate that the domain might have been with its Dubai registrant as early as in 2016.
There is no recorded sale for InstaShop.com at NameBio. The original 1998 registration lapsed in 2003, and the domain name dropped.
Read more about the acquisition of InstaShop in this article by Forbes.
