DoorDash came to its third-quarter earnings call with record revenue and nearly a billion orders. But analysts kept coming back to a business it didn’t yet own. DoorDash had just signed a deal to buy Instacart, and they wanted to know what would happen to the grocery app, what a DashPass membership would buy and why a company that already delivers groceries needed another way to do it.

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The $65-a-share agreement, announced Oct. 29, still needs approval from Instacart shareholders and must meet other closing conditions. DoorDash plans to support the Instacart brand, put its restaurant listings on Instacart and give DashPass members access to both subscriptions for the price they pay today. CEO Tony Xu said Instacart has a loyal audience. He also said much of what he wants to do with the business will be invisible to the people using either app.

For example, judging from the earnings call, consider the shopper who wants to buy groceries directly from a favorite local store. Instacart has spent more than a decade building software that lets grocers take orders through their own websites. DoorDash can supply the delivery. The grocer gets to keep the customer relationship, including the data that helps it decide which offers to send the next time that shopper needs groceries.

“You combine that with our first-party logistics capabilities, which we pioneered with DoorDash Drive also over a decade ago, and you can offer merchants the ability to build the best-in-class first-party experience for fast delivery, their own loyalty programs, their own data, their own customers,” Xu told an analyst who asked why DoorDash wanted to buy Instacart when its own grocery business was doing well.

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