Dive Brief:

• Instacart has named Nick Giovanni, a veteran Wall Street investment banker with deep experience working with technology companies, to be its next chief financial officer.
• Giovanni will join Instacart Jan. 27 following more than two decades working at Goldman Sachs, where he most recently served as head of the investment bank's Global Technology, Media and Telecom Group. He is replacing current CFO Sagar Sanghvi, whom Instacart credited with playing a key role in building the company's financial profile during his five years in the position.
• ​Instacart is bringing on a new financial leader as it moves toward what reportedly could be one of the highest-profile initial public offerings of 2021.

Dive Insight:

After spending 2020 rapidly scaling up to meet surging demand for its pickup and delivery services from grocers and other retailers, Instacart is sending out clear signals that it's getting ready to leap to the stock market.

At Goldman Sachs, Giovanni helped lead IPOs for a number of widely followed technology companies, including Twitter, eBay and Dropbox, according to his profile on LinkedIn. He also worked on several multibillion-dollar transactions involving publicly traded technology companies, including Salesforce's $27.7 billion deal to acquire Slack last year and Microsoft's 2011 acquisition of Skype, which was valued at $8.5 billion, Instacart pointed out in a press release announcing his hiring.

Instacart said it has worked with Giovanni over the past five years as he advised the e-commerce company "on a number of important business matters."

Giovanni is arriving at Instacart following an extraordinary year for the e-commerce provider, which now counts more than 500 food and other retailers in the United States and Canada as partners. The company recorded a 300% year-over-year increase in transaction volume in December and posted "five years of growth in five weeks" during one stretch since the pandemic began, CEO Apoorva Mehta told CNBC.

In October, Instacart announced that it had raised $200 million from investors in a financing round that valued the company at $17.7 billion. The following month, Reuters reported that the company was considering an IPO that could place its value at $30 billion.

"[Giovanni is] regarded as one of the most respected and accomplished technology and internet investment bankers, and he's played a pivotal role advising some of the world's most prolific companies, founders and management teams as they've scaled from being private companies to global leaders," Mehta said in a statement. "We're excited to now welcome him as our new CFO, where he'll help steer Instacart's next chapter of growth and strengthen our position as an essential service for consumers, shoppers and partners."