Sagar Sanghvi, Instacart's chief finance officer, left the on-demand grocery delivery startup earlier this year after nearly six years. He's now joining back as a partner at Accel, focusing on global growth-stage consumer and enterprise investments.

Sanghvi was the vice president of finance and strategy at Instacart before becoming the company's CFO. He took over as CFO of Instacart in 2019, after Ravi Gupta, who left the firm to join Sequoia Capital as a partner on the growth team.

Sanghvi and Gupta worked together at KKR as investors (after Sanghvi had worked as an analyst for Goldman Sachs), and it's worth noting that their career paths are similar, with Sanghvi initially working in finance and then becoming an operator before moving into venture capital. In 2015, they both joined Instacart and it was Gupta who first introduced Sanghvi to Accel's Miles Clements.

Sanghvi joined Instacart when it had about 300 people and it had more than 1,500 by the time he left earlier this year.

While Sanghvi would like to see a smaller firm “than have COVID happen to the world,” he adds it was a time when he learnt a lot while helping to expand the company.

During Sanghvi's time at Instacart, one of the projects he worked on was a $ 200 million investment round in October 2020, which valued the firm at $17.7 billion. (It has since raised another $265 million at a valuation of $39 billion.) In reality, the corporation raised more than $2 billion during his tenure.

But now, out of Accel's Palo Alto office, Sanghvi will be the one investing in other startups' rounds.

While his Instacart experience is clearly relevant to the consumer arena, Sanghvi stated that he will be working with a variety of enterprise solutions in addition to consumer-focused startups.

“He's done everything from raising $2 billion in finance to analyzing back office automation tools in minute detail. He has not only run a company that is on its way to becoming a household name, but he has also been a media investor at KKR”, remarks Clements. “He helped Instacart navigate through some recent huge fundraisers, but only because he had previously assisted Instacart in navigating through some past existential problems. As a result, he has a lot of natural empathy for entrepreneurs and founders”.

Sanghvi, for one, is excited to begin investing as part of the Accel team.

He claimed that when he decided to enter the venture capital market, he was seeking for a “very well-known brand” that invested at all stages. He stated he discovered it in Accel.