Some companies are born to improve efficiency. Others are born to change habits. Zepto belongs firmly to the latter. In less than half a decade, the company has transformed how urban India thinks about grocery shopping, turning a once-planned activity into an almost instinctive action. What began as a bold college experiment has grown into one of India’s most influential consumer tech stories, redefining speed, convenience, and everyday commerce.
The Beginning: Frustration, Curiosity and a Big Bet
Zepto was founded in 2021 by Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra, two young entrepreneurs who saw a simple but persistent problem. Grocery delivery was reliable, but it was slow. For a generation used to instant digital experiences, waiting hours for essentials felt outdated.
Instead of improving existing timelines, the founders questioned the timeline itself. Their answer was radical: groceries delivered in 10 minutes. What sounded unrealistic to many quickly became Zepto’s defining promise and its biggest differentiator. The idea was simple. If speed could be engineered at scale, consumer behaviour would follow.
Building the Engine: Dark Stores and Discipline
The early days were less glamorous than the headlines that followed. Zepto’s model relied on building a dense network of dark stores, small warehouses placed close to residential clusters. Every element was optimised: inventory selection, pick paths, rider allocation, and routing algorithms.
Execution mattered more than marketing at this stage. Each successful delivery reinforced belief among customers and investors alike. By focusing on operational discipline early, Zepto laid the foundation for growth without losing control over service quality.
Milestones That Accelerated the Journey
Zepto’s rise has been defined by speed, not just in delivery but in scaling the business itself.
Within two years of launch, the company expanded across major metros and key urban centres. By 2023, Zepto entered the unicorn club, signalling that quick commerce was not a passing trend but a structurally large opportunity.
By 2025, Zepto was operating hundreds of dark stores, serving millions of monthly users and competing head-to-head with the biggest names in Indian consumer tech. What stood out was not just expansion, but consistency in delivery times, which kept the brand promise intact even at scale.
Revenue and Market Growth: Numbers That Tell the Story
Zepto’s financial growth mirrors its operational momentum.
- FY23 revenue crossed approximately ₹2,000 crore, marking a sharp acceleration from its early launch years.
- FY24 saw revenue more than double to around ₹4,400 crore, driven by higher order frequency and expanding city coverage.
- FY25 was a breakout year, with reported revenue of over ₹11,000 crore, reflecting year-on-year growth of nearly 150 percent.
By 2026, Zepto has emerged as one of the largest players in India’s quick-commerce segment, helping define a category that barely existed a few years earlier.
Marketing Strategy: Making Speed a Lifestyle
Zepto’s marketing success lies in clarity. The brand did not try to be everything to everyone. It stood for one thing and communicated it relentlessly: speed.
Instead of heavy emotional storytelling in its early campaigns, Zepto focused on relatability. Ads mirrored real urban moments: running out of milk, last-minute guests, sudden cravings. Over time, speed became more than a feature. It became a habit.
The brand also leaned into app-first engagement, intuitive design and seamless checkout, ensuring that the promise of speed extended beyond delivery to the entire user experience.
Challenges Along the Way
Rapid growth brought inevitable challenges. Thin margins, high operational costs and intense competition made profitability a constant concern. Maintaining ten-minute delivery while expanding into new geographies tested logistics and workforce planning.
Experiments such as ready-to-eat and café-style offerings highlighted the tension between innovation and execution. Some initiatives were paused or recalibrated, reinforcing the importance of focus in a high-velocity business.
Yet these challenges strengthened Zepto’s internal systems, pushing the company to refine unit economics and improve efficiency without diluting its core proposition.
Cultural Impact: Changing How India Shops
Zepto’s real achievement goes beyond revenue. It has reshaped consumer expectations. Convenience is no longer measured in hours, but in minutes. Grocery shopping has shifted from planning to impulse, from routine to on-demand.
For urban professionals, students and young families, Zepto has become infrastructure rather than indulgence. The brand sits quietly in daily life, powering moments people rarely stop to think about.
Looking Ahead: From Disruptor to Institution
As Zepto prepares for life as a public-market company, its story enters a new phase. The challenge ahead is evolution: sustaining growth, improving profitability and expanding responsibly, all while preserving the speed and reliability that built its reputation.
From a college-born idea to a ₹11,000+ crore enterprise, Zepto’s journey offers a clear lesson for business leaders. Category leadership is earned not through incremental change, but through bold vision, disciplined execution and deep understanding of how people live.
Zepto did not just deliver groceries faster. It delivered a new way of thinking about time, convenience and modern consumption in India.
Jaspreet Singh Arora is the Chief Investment Officer at Equentis, where he heads a seasoned team of equity analysts and turns two decades of market experience into portfolios that consistently beat the benchmark. A go-to voice on cement, building-materials, real-estate, and construction stocks, Jaspreet previously ran research desks at leading brokerages, honing an eye for the metrics that truly move share prices. His plain-spoken analysis helps investors cut through noise and act with conviction. When he’s not deep-diving into earnings calls, you’ll find him unwinding over sports, weekend cricket or a good history podcast.
