Sixteen Mumbai High School Students Leave Stanford to Launch a Grocery Company and Raise $60 Million
Nexus Venture, Global Founders, and Silicon Valley angel investors Lachy Groom and Neeraj Arora fund Zepto, a Mumbai-based firm founded earlier this year by 19-year-olds Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra.
Zepto is expanding its footprint in India’s competitive but quickly developing grocery delivery business, thanks to $60 million in funding from Y Combinator and Glade Brook Capital. Two Stanford University dropouts in their late teens created the company.
Zepto, founded earlier this year by 19-year-olds Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra, is already funded by Nexus Venture, Global Founders, and Silicon Valley angel investors Lachy Groom and Neeraj Arora, according to a statement made on Sunday by the Mumbai-based business. In a conference call, co-founder and CEO Palicha estimated that the company is worth “between $200m and $300m.”
Despite getting accepted into Stanford University’s top computer science engineering programme last year, Palicha and Vohra chose to postpone their education in order to focus on launching their own company. During India’s pandemic-related lockdowns, demand for food delivery skyrocketed, prompting them to develop a service that went live earlier this year.
Other prominent online grocers, such as Grofers, which is financed by SoftBank Group Corp., and Dunzo, which is backed by Google, will compete with Zepto. With a network of micro-warehouses known as cloud or dark shops in the company, it hopes to up the ante and deliver within 10 minutes in Bangalore, Mumbai, and Delhi neighbourhoods.
In addition to these three present locations, the company expects to open offices in Hyderabad, Pune, Kolkata, and Chennai in the coming weeks.
In a press statement, Palicha hailed Q-Commerce in India as a “wonderful potential.” According to the CEO, the company is growing at a rate of 200 percent per month.
