Instacart Inc., one of the heavily funded startups competing in the on-demand grocery delivery market, has added an additional $600 million to its coffers.

Instacart announced the funding round this morning, naming high-profile hedge D1 Capital Partners LP as the lead investor. The financing values the startup at $7.6 billion, a more than 70 percent jump over the valuation that it was given after a previous $150 million raise in April.

Instacart has received a total of $950 million from investors over the past eight months and significantly expanded its operations along the way. The startup claims that the number of retailers offering their goods via its platform is up 50 percent since February, to 300. The list includes Walmart Inc., Kroger Co., Sam’s West Inc. and other national chains.

Users can order goods via Instacart’s mobile app and have them picked up by one of the 50,000 shoppers who work through the platform. The startup claims that the service is currently accessible to more than 70 percent of U.S. households and about half of Canada, which amounts to 15,000 stores across 4,000 cities in real numbers. 

Instacart boasts of having reached this point without spending the $350 million from its last two rounds. A source shared more details about the startup’s financials with Bloomberg, saying that it’s still in the red but makes a profit on each order when excluding “central” costs such as office rent. Instacart’s strong balance sheer compared with other tech firms such as Uber Technologies Inc. that are still unprofitable probably helped ease its fundraising efforts. 

The startup will begin spending some of the recently raised capital in the coming months. Instacart Chief Executive Officer Apoorva Mehta told TechCrunch that the plan is to double its engineering group by the end of the year, partially by filling 300 technical positions at a recently opened Toronto office. The startup will also step up marketing efforts in a bid to raise brand awareness. 

Despite being valued at $7.6 billion, Instacart still sees plenty of room for expansion in the U.S. e-commerce market. “The U.S. is nearly a $1 trillion grocery market, and last year we saw almost every major grocer in North America bring their delivery business online in a significant way,” Mehta said in a statement. “We believe we’re in the very early stages of a massive shift in the way people buy groceries and we expect that one in five Americans will be shopping for their groceries online in the next five years.”

Instacart is one of several companies eyeing this market. Other venture-backed startups such as Postmates Inc., which recently raised $300 million in funding, provide similar services, while Amazon.com Inc. is offering on-demand personal shopping at a growing number of Whole Foods locations.

Photo: Instacart