The first version of the idea was a WhatsApp group. During the pandemic, Aadit Palicha and his friend Kaivalya Vohra were in Mumbai, where getting groceries could mean waiting days. They began taking orders from people around them. There was no tidy founding myth in the chat window: only a familiar inconvenience, two people with time to investigate it, and customers willing to tell them when the service failed.
They had intended to study computer science at Stanford. Its shift to virtual classes changed the shape of that plan. Palicha later described the period as a chance to build something interesting, and said the pair spent about a year talking to customers and adjusting their model. The choice to commit to the company came after that work, once they had evidence of demand. It was a decision their families could measure in revenue, even if they could hardly measure it in parental comfort.
The company eventually called Zepto is now associated with a neat number: ten minutes. Its origin was far less neat. The pair’s earlier service, KiranaKart, could take more than an hour. Because it collected products from other stores, it struggled to control what was on the shelf or whether the right item reached the customer. A minute on a billboard is simple. A minute inside a supply chain is an argument with reality.
The experiment before the promise
Palicha and Vohra tried a different arrangement: a small warehouse dedicated to online orders, known as a dark store. The first opened in Bandra on July 14, 2021. Palicha has said it cost about $50,000. They chose Bandra for its density, reasoning that many nearby customers could support a short delivery radius. The location was a business calculation hidden inside a map.
The founders also tested time itself. In different areas they offered delivery windows of 45 minutes, 30 minutes and roughly 10 to 15 minutes. They gathered ratings through a basic form, watched whether people returned, and asked customers directly how they felt. The shorter windows performed better. Zepto’s signature number emerged from those observations, then demanded a company built to match them.
Inside a dark store, speed is a series of ordinary choices. The products people buy most often sit near the exit. Packers use software to find an efficient path, scan items to confirm accuracy, and hand an order to a rider whose screen uses color to make the match faster. Racks, chillers and handover stations have their place in the calculation. None of this is glamorous, though an absent carton of milk can turn a glamorous pitch into a very short relationship.
The rider mattered to Palicha’s early model too. A central pickup point, he argued, could make a shift less erratic than collecting from stores scattered across a city. A rider who ends the day far from home has paid for the customer’s convenience in a currency the app does not show. The company’s promise depended on many workers doing a small part quickly and repeatedly.
From one neighborhood to a company
The Bandra store reached a few hundred orders a day quickly, Palicha recalled. That was enough to change the founders’ questions. Where should the next store go? Which neighborhoods had enough demand? Who could build the software and hire the teams? During the six months after the launch, Zepto raised several rounds of capital. By October 2022, it had raised more than $360 million and was valued at over $900 million.
Scale brought the need for older hands, though age itself is an imperfect management tool. Palicha said he recruited early executives by taking them to dark stores and offering broad responsibility and equity. He described those hires as “semi-founders.” One senior colleague would recommend another, and the network grew. Vohra, his friend since elementary school, remained the partner at the center of the project, serving as chief technology officer while Palicha led as chief executive.
That post is one of the better windows into his public character. He remembered the argument about 25 stores, then directed attention to the operations team that had opened hundreds of stores and hired thousands of people across the business. A founder can make himself the headline in a sentence. Palicha used that one to name the people who had turned a debate into an address list.
Zepto became a unicorn in 2023, with a funding round that valued it at $1.4 billion. In 2024, another round put the valuation at $5 billion. Such numbers made Palicha, then in his early twenties, a subject of rich lists and profiles. They also changed the scale of the assignment. A handful of neighborhoods can be watched closely by founders. A growing national network needs systems that continue to work when its founders are elsewhere.
“Right now, the only sustainable edge long term is execution.”Aadit Palicha, 2025
The bill for convenience
Execution is an unromantic word for a business built around a dramatic clock. Every nearby store needs rent, stock and staff. The rider needs a route that works. The customer needs selection, accuracy and a price that makes another order attractive. Palicha has described the work of lowering costs in tiny increments, “paisa-by-paisa, basis point-by-basis point.” A ten-minute delivery can win attention once; the economics of thousands of deliveries decide how often the promise can be made.
There have been visible stumbles. In 2025, Zepto faced criticism over delivery fees and pricing practices on its app. Palicha acknowledged that some experiments had produced valid complaints. “It was a mistake. It won’t happen again,” he said in an interview. This admission belongs in the account of his leadership as much as the funding rounds do. A fast service makes errors arrive quickly too, and a customer who feels tricked has little reason to admire the logistics.
The company also faced scrutiny of a dark store in Dharavi that year. Palicha disputed the interpretation of some images of expired goods and said the store had been audited and reopened. The dispute illustrated a problem larger than a single inspection: a company that brings groceries into people’s homes in minutes must make its backstage operations legible enough to earn confidence. The public sees the order, the fee and the bag. Everything else must still hold up.
By 2026, the financial timetable had become as important as the delivery timetable. Zepto had been preparing for a stock-market listing, then moved the target later. Palicha told employees in July the company was aiming to list in two to three quarters, after improving its financial metrics and finding more favorable terms. Zepto announced a primary pre-IPO private placement in August. A public market offers a different kind of customer: one who studies a quarter instead of a delivery timer.
A longer measure of speed
Palicha’s earlier story is often condensed to Stanford and a stopwatch. The details resist that compression. The founders stayed in India when classes went online. They ran a WhatsApp group, tried a slower service, talked with customers, changed their warehouse model, and tested delivery windows. They put $50,000 into a first store because Bandra looked dense enough. Then they had to build a team that could repeat the exercise without them at every shelf.
The later story is just as specific. It contains the 100th Mumbai store, a public admission about fees, the pressure to lower costs and an IPO timetable that moved. None of these fits neatly into ten minutes. They are measured in repeat orders, store maturity and whether customers feel the price on the screen is the price they agreed to pay.
At a 2024 public summit, Palicha remembered Vohra’s mother crying when she heard the founders were leaving their academic path. She wondered what had happened to the life waiting for her son. It is a comic detail only at a distance; up close, it is the ordinary anxiety that accompanies an extraordinary career decision. The founders had numbers to reassure their parents. Now Palicha has more people to convince, and a bigger set of numbers with which to do it.
The appeal of Zepto remains plain. In a crowded city, convenience has real value. Palicha saw that before a ten-minute label gave the idea a shape. His current task is to preserve that convenience while making the system behind it cheaper, clearer and trustworthy. The stopwatch started the conversation. The receipt, and the years after it, will finish the argument.