Grocery delivery service Instacart acqui-hires Wedding Party

Wedding Party is an app that collects wedding photos from guests, turning them into digital albums

Fresh off a $220 million funding round raised in January, grocery delivery service Instacart is putting that money to good use, allowing the company to make its first ever acquisition.

Instacart has purchased Wedding Party, an app turned weddings into social experiences, it has been confirmed to VatorNews.

While no financial terms of the deal were disclosed, this is an acqui-hire, as no technology from Wedding Party will be integrated into Instacart, and a majority of its team, six out of eight, will be joining Instacart as full time employees. They will focus on consumer-facing aspects to Instacart’s technology, as well as its partner products, including the partner interface and catalogs.

Founded in 2012, Wedding Party is an app that collects wedding photos from guests, allowing photos to be collected and organized, turning them into digital albums that can be shared. It also provides updates on the wedding details for guests, including the bridal party, family and vendors. It also offers suggestions from wedding experts, and support for emergencies.

"Wedding Party is great at creating consumer experiences, which is Instacart's primary focus, and they have great experience creating tools for wedding vendors. For example, they had been working with merchants on providing personalized services for their couples. Additionally, Wedding Party is very data driven which aligns nicely with our culture," Andrea Saul, VP of communications at Instacart, told me. 

"At Instacart, customer experience is our most important consideration, so we are thrilled to bring Wedding Party on our team to help us continue to improve our customer experience."

"In addition to our consumer products, we built a lot of underlying technology to facilitate the business relationship between couples and vendors," Himani Amoli, co-founder of Wedding Party, told me. "The experience our team has building these products will be valuable at Instacart because of some of the analogous products and problems that they are working on."

Despite the staff leaving for Instacart, Wedding Party will continue to support the product for the foreseeable future with support staff still available.

The Palo Alto-based company had raised a $1 million seed round from Felicis Ventures and New Enterprise Associates, followed by an undisclosed amount of Series A funding from Pejman Mar Ventures and Streamlined Ventures.

Instacart, which was founded in 2012, is a same-day grocery delivery startup, focused on groceries and home essentials. The comopany already has over 500,000 items from local stores in its catalogue.

The company has raised nearly $275 million in funding, from investors that have included Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Comcast Ventures, Dragoneer Investment Group, Thrive Capital, Valiant Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital. 

While Wedding Party is the first acquisition for the company, it will definitely not be the last.

"While this is our first acquire, we’ll be looking for more teams to join us and build great experiences for our consumers, shoppers, partners and our operations teams," said Saul.

This acquisition was first reported by TechCrunch on Tuesday.

(Image source: weddingpartyapp.com)