We all have had this idea of “Business planning” at some point in our lives, but implementing it is the main thing. But 19 year old Zepto founders Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra are not the same.
Both are the Stanford University dropouts who founded Zepto, a 10-minute grocery delivery app, in 2020 and soon convinced the companies to invest in them.
Zepto is a start-up that works with grocery providers to deliver fresh food to consumers’ doorsteps. The company is based in Bengaluru and has been a significant start-up in the last two years. Zepto aims to disrupt the grocery delivery market by offering a model that is efficient and profitable. It has an experienced team of engineers, a business model, a proven solution, and its network of food trucks that can meet customers at any point in time.
Both Aadit and Kaivalya had enrolled at Stanford to pursue a Computer Science degree but dropped out to pursue their entrepreneurial interests. They first got the idea of Zepto during the pandemic. Zepto was founded with the vision to deliver groceries and many essential items to the home in as little time as possible because the pandemic had resulted in the rising demand for home deliveries as people were avoiding leaving their homes unless it was something important.
Zepto, the company, started delivery service in Bangalore in 2020, soon after their first start-up didn’t end well in the pandemic. The new business model integrates many benefits that have been developed by entrepreneurs in the past and has the potential to bring substantial revenue. Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra formed Zepto in 2020 and started delivering groceries in Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai. They are Stanford dropouts and came up with this idea while working as engineers at a technology start-up.
As an entrepreneur, it’s only natural that they waste a lot of time during meetings with other entrepreneurs. They tried to make sure that they made the most of these meetings by using their expertise to learn more about the industry but often found themselves spending more time arguing about the details rather than the larger picture. Zepto, a 10-minute grocery delivery app in India, raised $100 million. According to an inner source who is familiar with the matter, the investment led by Tiger Global Management and Reliance Capital includes a $70 million Series D and another $20 million in convertible debt, for a total of $100 million. The round values the company at about $500 million. Zepto has raised $150 million to date.
Zepto, a grocery delivery app, raised $100 million, has a strong user base, and is now scaling up to deliver groceries in more cities. Matrix Partners India led the seed round, Sequoia Capital India, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Kalaari Capital. The company raised another $100 million in a Series B round led by SoftBank and Tiger Global, taking their total funding to more than $325 million.nThe round was led by Goldman Sachs, and its existing investors, DST and Nexus Venture Partners, participated.
Though Zepto had great success, their first Start-up, KiranaKart, did not end up so well. It is determined by the fact that many of us have not even heard of this name before. But they took the basic idea for Zepto from KiranaKart only. As the name suggests, KiranaKart was a grocery delivery app too. KiranaKart tied up with the town’s Kirana stores to deliver groceries within 40-45 minutes. It had raised $730,000 in a pre-seed round led by Global Founders Capital, Contrary Capital.
During an interview, Palicha said the start-up is truly overwhelmed with all the support and excitement it is seeing from the customers. Still, it doesn’t want to “become self-satisfactory.” “We both are somewhat overly critical of ourselves and hold ourselves to very high standards. People are really happy that they are getting their deliveries in 10 minutes or less, but we want to continue to focus on scaling our SKUs and want to focus on improving our unit economics.”
Zepto operates in Bangalore, Delhi, Gurgaon, Chennai and Hyderabad, and it soon plans to expand to Pune and Kolkata. To ensure instant deliveries, it has set up a web of almost more than 100 dark stores across these cities that it continually optimizes in real-time to ensure timely delivery of your products.
“We are looking at a pretty crazy run rate,” he said. “In the past one and a half years, we have grown our business by ten times. And now we are working to grow another ten times by February or March,” said Palicha.
He also mentioned that so many executives were willing to join Zepto because it has enabled many people who first moved from Mumbai to Bangalore to come back to their home town due to lockdown and pandemic. But thanks to Start-ups’ extensive growth, disciplined execution, and ambitious nature, it has made it attractive for people with similar tastes. “We have been able to walk the walk,” he said.
