India's quick-commerce pioneer — 10-minute grocery delivery at scale, now navigating a bruising IPO reality check
HQ: Mumbai, Maharashtra, India | Founded: 2021 | Employees: Not publicly disclosed (thousands incl. delivery partners) | Stage: Late-stage private (pre-IPO) | Website: https://www.zepto.now
Zepto was founded in 2021 by Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra, two 19-year-old Stanford computer science dropouts from Mumbai who had previously built (and shut) aKiranaKart, a grocery delivery experiment. Their insight was operational rather than technological: Indian consumers would pay for 10-minute grocery delivery if the logistics were dense enough. The name 'Zepto' refers to a zeptosecond — one trillionth of a billionth of a second.
The model is dark stores: small warehouses stocked with 2,000-6,000 SKUs, placed close to demand clusters, paired with gig delivery riders and routing software. Zepto grew from 40K beta users to hundreds of dark stores within two years, riding the COVID-era grocery boom and a series of fast funding rounds — including a $665M round at $3.6B (2024), $340M at $5B (Aug 2024), and a $450M round at $7B led by CalPERS (Oct 2025) with General Catalyst and others.
The scale today is genuinely large: 1,100+ dark stores across 80+ cities, 2.5M+ daily orders, ₹9,366 crore (~$1.1B) FY25 revenue, and a monthly transacting user base in the tens of millions. The company reported progress toward EBITDA-level profitability at the unit level and targets of $1B in quarterly order value.
Then came the reality check. Zepto filed for an IPO in 2026 — but Indian institutional investors, wary of quick-commerce cash burn and competitive intensity, pushed back hard on valuation. Bloomberg reported the company facing marks near $2.5-4.5B versus its $7B private peak. In August 2026 Zepto shelved the listing and raised a ₹1,000 crore (~$119M) pre-IPO bridge from domestic institutions at about $4.5B, delaying the public offering indefinitely. The episode has made Zepto the reference point for whether India's quick-commerce category — Zepto, Blinkit (Zomato/Eternal), and Swiggy Instamart — can convert scale into durable profits.
Zepto built India's fastest-growing quick-commerce business — 1,100+ dark stores, 2.5M orders a day, ₹9,366 crore FY25 revenue — then ran straight into the gap between private-market hype and public-market discipline: investors balked at $7B, the IPO was shelved, and the company is now the test case for whether quick commerce anywhere can be durably profitable.
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