After the expansion, the service will be available from about 350 of the nearly 600 Sam's Club stores. The move follows pilot programs that started in February.

Sam’s Club, the warehouse club chain owned by Walmart Inc. (No. 3 in the Internet Retailer 2018 Top 500), will expand grocery delivery via the app-based grocery delivery service Instacart to 100 more locations by the end of October, reaching a total of 350, the companies announced Thursday.

The expansion means Instacart will be available to nearly 1,000 new ZIP codes and 90 new markets via Sam’s Club stores, including New Jersey, Indianapolis and Houston, the companies said in a statement.

The expansion follows pilot programs in Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin and St. Louis, as well as recent launches in San Diego and Los Angeles, which started in February. Sam’s Club operates nearly 600 warehouse clubs in the U.S. and Puerto Rico.

The announcement comes in the same week Instacart said it had raised $600 million in new funding from investors, bringing its total funding to $1.6 billion, according to Crunchbase data. Instacart raised nearly a $1 billion of that in the last eight months. During that period, Instacart also increased the number of grocery retailers on its platform by 50% to about 300.

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Instacart’s latest funding round values the company at $7.6 billion, the company says. That is a significant jump from a valuation of $4.35 billion six months ago. Hedge fund D1 Capital Partners, run by the former Viking Global Investors chief investment officer Daniel Sundheim, led the round.

Instacart pays a mix of contractors and employees to pick, pack and deliver orders, often within a few hours of a customer’s order online. The company says it has 600 full-time employees across North America.

Instacart says its service is accessible to more than 70% of U.S. households and more than 50% of Canadian households from more than 15,000 individual grocery stores in 4,000 cities.

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In September, the grocery chain Aldi said it would bring Instacart online ordering and delivery to Aldi stores nationwide by Thanksgiving. Aldi and Instacart launched a pilot program Aldi initiated with Instacart just over a year ago. That pilot tested Instacart delivery in Los Angeles, Atlanta and Dallas and was later expanded to the greater Chicago and Northwest Indiana areas.

In August, Instacart and Kroger Co., the country’s largest traditional grocery store chain and No. 86 in the Top 1000, expanded their relationship to include stores in 75 additional markets. That expansion, like the one with Sam’s Club, should be complete by the end of October and will boost the national footprint of Kroger’s delivery via Instacart by 50%, Kroger says. The initiative makes the service available from more than 1,600 of Kroger’s 2,800 stores.

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