As it expands into newer cities, the startup's valuation has more than doubled to $570 million from $225 million.
The $100 million Series C round was led by the Continuity Fund. The round brought the company's to-date raise to $160 million.
The startup was founded by two 19-year-old entrepreneurs who left the university. The local startup community was interested in the business long before it began talking about it.
A 10-minute grocery delivery service has become very popular in several parts of the world in recent quarters. Heavily-backed players have entered the instant grocery delivery business.
Until Zepto arrived, neither of them had decided to do this business. It was a coincidence that Zepto arrived in the scene. Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra returned to India shortly before the nation was ravaged by the Pandemic.
The teenagers, who previously collaborated on a number of projects, were locked in their houses in Mumbai. Even though grocery deliveries were still allowed in much of the nation, the two struggled to get their groceries as the Pandemic raged.
The online play of the Indian grocery delivery space was grappling with some gross execution errors, according to Palicha.
Palicha said in an interview last week that the startup is overwhelmed with the support and excitement it is seeing from the customers, but it doesn't want to become complacent.
We hold ourselves to very high standards and are somewhat overly critical of ourselves. He said that people are happy that they are getting their deliveries in 10 minutes or less, but can we continue to focus on improving unit economics? He said that Zepto is cautious about keeping its employees and delivery partners happy, pointing to the retention and internal feedback.
Vohra said that it has built a network of micro-warehouses that can do over 2,500 orders a day.
The e-grocery market in India is estimated to be worth $25 billion by the year 2025, according to a note. By the year 2025, online grocery penetration is expected to reach 3%. The long-term structural drivers include rising income and affluence, lower tier consumption, e- commerce penetration and a young population. The analysts wrote that the amount of income spent on groceries remained high at 30%.
The store is dark. The image is from Zepto.
Currently, Zepto operates in Bangalore, Delhi, Gurgaon, Chennai and Hyderabad, and plans to expand to other cities in the near future. It has set up a maze of over 100 dark stores in the cities to make sure that they are ready for fast deliveries.
He said that they were looking at a crazy runrate. We have grown our business by 10 times in the past six months. Palicha said that they are working to grow another 10 times by February or March.
The talent it has been able to attract in recent months is moving in the right direction. Several high-profile executives have joined the startup.
Palicha said that many executives who had moved from Mumbai to Bangalore have been able to return to their home city. He said that the startup is attractive to people with similar taste because of its aggressive growth, disciplined execution, and ambitions. He said that they had been able to walk the walk.
We are going to lead this round in Zepto. Since Aadit and Kaivalya went through Y Combinator, we have observed that they are exceptional founders who bring relentless focus and dash-like execution to the quick commerce model.
They pivoted to quick commerce in August of 2021 and have added 100,000 new customers every week, of which 60 percent are women. They have been able to scale to most major metros in just 5 months because of their attention to detail. We are confident that Zepto will win over the long-term.
