The Colombia-founded company has processed more than 100 million transactions and works with nearly 100 retailers and marketplaces

Instacart, a US grocery technology company serving more than 2,200 retail banners and nearly 100,000 stores, announced the acquisition of Instaleap, a Colombia-founded fulfillment and retail technology platform operating in nearly 30 countries, in a deal whose financial terms were not disclosed.

The transaction represents one of Instacart’s most significant international moves since going public in 2023 and strengthens its expansion outside North America, particularly in Latin America, Europe and the Middle East.

Instacart, which trades on Nasdaq under the ticker CART, is seeking to expand its enterprise technology platform focused on omnichannel commerce and the digital transformation of supermarkets and retailers.

“We see a meaningful opportunity to expand internationally through an enterprise-led strategy that empowers retailers across the globe to meet the evolving omnichannel needs of their customers,” Ryan Hamburger, chief commercial officer at Instacart, said in the company’s statement.

Global expansion driven by Latin American technology

Instaleap develops software solutions for supermarkets, pharmacies and consumer goods retailers, enabling them to manage orders, logistics, picking operations and customer experience across digital channels.

The company has processed more than 100 million transactions and maintains commercial relationships with nearly 100 retailers and marketplaces outside North America, including Cencosud, Éxito, Makro, Continente, Jerónimo Martins (owners of Tiendas Ara), Lulu, and SPAR.

The acquisition also allows Instacart to accelerate its presence in regions where it previously had limited operations. The company had already begun deploying products such as Storefront Pro and its AI-powered Caper Carts in Europe and Australia but lacked a consolidated network in Latin America and the Middle East.

Instaleap to continue operating as subsidiary

According to the companies, Instaleap will initially continue operating as a wholly owned subsidiary of Instacart to ensure continuity for existing customers during the integration process.

“We’ve built our platform with a deep focus on the unique needs of grocery retailers across diverse international markets. Joining Instacart enables us to scale our impact with the support of a trusted partner that shares our commitment to retailer success,” said Antonio dos Santos Nunes, CEO and co-founder of Instaleap.

The company was founded in Colombia in 2019 by Portuguese entrepreneurs Antonio dos Santos Nunes and Margarida Freitas, the company’s current COO. Both joined the global entrepreneurship network Endeavor in 2025.

The companies did not disclose whether Instaleap’s current management team will remain in place after the transition period.

E-commerce growth fuels regional expansion

The announcement comes amid sustained growth in e-commerce across Latin America, particularly in Colombia.

According to figures cited in the statements, Colombian e-commerce grew 19.9% in 2025, reaching $684.6 million USD transactions, while the regional online grocery market surpassed $3.62 billion USD last year.

Instacart reported adjusted EBITDA of $1.09 billion USD in 2025, representing 23% year-over-year growth, along with 312 million processed orders.

With the acquisition, the company expects to gradually extend additional solutions to Instaleap’s clients, including e-commerce services, retail media, artificial intelligence and in-store technology.

At Nohra Haime Gallery, in Manhattan’s white-walled Chelsea district, Cartagena-based artist Ruby Rumié is asking a deceptively simple question: How are the children?

It is not a casual greeting, nor the sentimental title of a new exhibition. Instead, it draws from the Maasai expression “Kasserian Ingera,” a phrase that measures the wellbeing of an entire community through the condition of its youngest members. If the children are well, the society is functioning; if they are not, everything else is called into question.

For Rumié, whose socially engaged practice has long examined dignity, memory and the politics of the body through installation and portrait photography, the question becomes the conceptual spine of her latest New York presentation. The exhibition, titled ¿How Are the Children?, marks a significant moment for the Cartagena-based artist, bringing her work once again into an international conversation that moves between Latin America, the Caribbean and the wider Global South.

Rather than beginning with a grand theoretical premise, the project emerged from something quieter: an old newspaper clipping documenting the disappearance of several children on a distant island. Nearly lost among family albums and forgotten papers, the fragment offered no resolution, only a trace. For Rumié, that absence became more powerful than explanation.

The result is an exhibition that does not attempt to solve a mystery but instead inhabits a state of unresolved concern. It asks viewers to remain with discomfort rather than consume a narrative neatly packaged for closure. In a cultural moment increasingly shaped by speed, certainty and spectacle, this refusal feels deliberate.

Within the work’s imagined structure, eleven children leave behind the violences of contemporary life: the pressure to perform, the normalization of fear, and the relentless demand to adapt to adult systems of productivity and control. Their destination is a volcano, a symbol that carries both danger and possibility.

Rumié anchors that image in a distinctly Colombian geography: the Totumo Mud Volcano, located between Cartagena and Barranquilla on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. Known locally as both a tourist curiosity and a place of ancestral ritual, the volcano is less about eruption than immersion. Visitors descend into a dense crater of warm mineral mud, confronting the instinctive fear of sinking—only to discover that the body floats.

This paradox sits at the heart of the exhibition and of Rumié’s photographic narratives.

Using portrait photography staged on the sandy slopes surrounding Totumo, she transforms her young subjects into something resembling living ceramics. Their bodies, coated in volcanic mud, appear sculptural and elemental – figures suspended between portrait and artifact, between childhood and myth. The mud gives them a tactile permanence, as though they have emerged from the earth itself rather than simply stood before the camera.

Here, mud is not scenic backdrop but primary material and metaphor. It is organic and mineral, medicinal and unsettling. It obscures the body while revealing something more essential beneath the surface. Covered in mud, distinctions of age, class, gender and origin begin to dissolve. The body ceases to be an object for display and returns to its simplest state: matter.

There is a quiet political force in that gesture. In a world saturated by images and increasingly hostile standards of beauty, the act of covering oneself in mud becomes a rejection of polished performance. It resists visibility as spectacle and proposes instead a form of symbolic density—one in which the body is not consumed but encountered.

The children in Rumié’s exhibition do not perform innocence. They do not dramatize suffering for the viewer’s emotional satisfaction. Instead, they surround the volcano with calm insistence, each holding a red ribbon that descends from its summit into their hands. The ribbon suggests connection rather than rescue, lineage rather than alarm. The volcano ceases to be a site of threat and becomes something closer to a shared origin: a matrix, a beginning.

That restraint is perhaps the work’s greatest strength. Rumié avoids the familiar traps of political art that over-explains its intentions or aestheticizes trauma into digestible symbolism. Instead, she builds an atmosphere of attention. The exhibition trusts silence. It asks not for interpretation alone, but for ethical presence.

This has been a defining feature of Rumié’s extensive projects. Her work often moves between installation, photography and social intervention, examining how communities remember violence and how institutions choose to see – or not – the vulnerable. Her native Cartagena, with its layered histories of colonialism, tourism and exclusion, remains both context and counterpoint.

Showing this work in New York adds another dimension. Chelsea galleries are not typically spaces associated with collective care or recetive to questions of social reparations. Yet that friction is productive. To pose “How are the children?” in the commercial heart of the international art market is to redirect attention from value to responsibility.

It is also a reminder that contemporary Latin American art is often at its most compelling when it resists exotic labels and insists on moral complexity instead. Rumié does not offer folklore, nor easy allegory. She offers a question as elusive as the landscape itself, echoing the vast and shifting terrains once depicted by the Prussian explorer Alexander von Humboldt during his travels across the continent.

And perhaps that is Rumié’s point. The exhibition offers no definitive answers, nor any final declaration of hope or despair. Instead, it leaves visitors carrying the weight of the original inquiry – returned intact, urgent and impossible to ignore, just like a volcano.

¿How Are the Children? opens on 7 May at Nohra Haime Gallery

Nohra Haime Gallery: 500A West 21st Street, New York.