Target has agreed to acquire  Shipt, the Birmingham-based online grocery delivery platform, for $550 million in cash.

Shipt is one of Birmingham's fastest growing companies and one of its most notable startups. Founded in 2014, the company has rapidly expanded its footprint and emerged as a key player in the grocery delivery industry - raising more than $60 million in the past two years.

Target said Shipt will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary and will continue to run its business independently, with employees working out of its offices in Birmingham and San Francisco.

With the press of a button on Tuesday, an industrial cutting machine made fine shavings of aluminum fly off a blank sheet. As those shavings scattered, the future USS Mobile took its first step out of blueprints and into the real world.

There are many more cuts, and welds, to come. Craig Perciavalle, president of Austal USA, said he anticipates roughly a three-year build cycle for LCS 26, the thirteenth Littoral Combat Ship to be built by Austal USA at its shipyard in Mobile. The plate carved Tuesday, about a quarter-inch thick and more than six feet wide by 20 feet long, will form part of the skin of the ship.

For the next year or so, Austal workers will build sections of the ship called modules, and when the company begins to put them together, in about a year, it'll hold a keel-laying ceremony. After other year it'll be ready for christening and launch, and somewhere around late 2020 it'll be ready for delivery and commissioning, Perciavalle said.