In the summer of 2022, a Pakistani grocery startup began describing itself to investors as "the Rappi for Pakistan." It was a useful shorthand - Rappi being the Latin American delivery app everyone in the room already understood. But the more interesting thing about Krave Mart was not what it copied. It was what it refused to copy.
Quick commerce, the business of delivering groceries to your door in minutes, arrived in Pakistan the way it arrived everywhere: loud, subsidized, and promising the impossible. Ten minutes. Free delivery. Prices below cost. The category's defining Pakistani story was Airlift, a Lahore startup that raised enormous sums, expanded fast, and then shut down in 2022 after reportedly burning through roughly $85 million in about eleven months. Krave Mart watched that happen from Karachi and drew a quiet conclusion: speed was not the product. Survival was.
So Krave Mart slowed down on purpose. It stretched its delivery promise to a realistic 30 to 40 minutes. It stocked its own warehouses instead of running to third-party shops. And it started making its own rice, eggs and bread. None of this was glamorous. All of it was the point.
01 / What it isThe 30-minute grocery run, rebuilt
Krave Mart is a quick-commerce grocery company. A customer opens the app, fills a cart from more than 4,500 products - fresh produce, bakery, snacks, cleaning supplies, the everyday middle of a Pakistani kitchen - and a rider brings it over in about half an hour. Big brands sit on the digital shelves: Nestle, Pepsi, Lipton, Colgate, Soya Supreme. There are no service fees layered on top.
The machine behind that simple experience is a network of dark stores: small warehouses, closed to the public, positioned inside neighborhoods so the last mile stays short. By late 2022 the company was running around 22 of them across Pakistan's larger cities and holding roughly 2,500 stock-keeping units per store. The dark store is the whole trick. Put inventory close to people, and a 30-minute promise becomes an operations problem you can actually solve instead of a marketing claim you have to subsidize.
It helps to remember where the assortment started. At launch, Krave Mart carried about 1,400 items. As it learned which products people reordered, that catalog grew past 2,500, then past 4,500. Each new category - fresh produce here, cleaning supplies there - was a chance to turn a one-item impulse order into a full household run. The app grew not by shouting louder but by quietly becoming the place you no longer needed a second app for.
The number that matters. In quick commerce, frequency is nice but basket size is where the money lives. Krave Mart pushed the average cart from three items to eleven.
02 / Who buysUrban households, top-up shopping
The customer is an ordinary city household in Karachi, Lahore or Rawalpindi - the person who realizes at 8pm that the eggs are gone, or who would rather not fight traffic for a weekly stock-up. Krave Mart set a minimum viable cart at around 1,200 Pakistani rupees, roughly the cost of a small real grocery trip, and let its assortment do the rest. By late 2022 it reported monthly gross merchandise value of about $1 million at 26% margins. Its Instagram following sits near 83,000. These are not blitzscaling numbers. They are the numbers of a business trying to make each order pay for itself.
"Private labels, wider assortment and a 30-to-40-minute delivery window are what let quick commerce actually sustain and thrive."
03 / The problemGroceries in a cash-and-corner-shop country
Pakistan has more than 240 million people and a grocery habit that still runs largely on neighborhood shops and cash. The problem Krave Mart set out to solve was not "how do we deliver in ten minutes." It was the older, harder one: how do you build a reliable, modern grocery supply chain in a market where margins are thin, roads are congested, and customers are rightly suspicious of hidden fees. The answer it landed on was infrastructure - warehouses, cold chain, riders, software - rather than discounts.
There is also a trust problem hiding underneath the logistics one. A shopper who cannot squeeze the tomatoes wants to know the tomatoes will be fresh, the order will be complete, and the price on the app is the price at the door. Krave Mart's zero-service-fee stance and its push on order accuracy were aimed squarely at that anxiety. In a market where a single bad delivery can cost you a customer for good, reliability is not a feature. It is the retention plan.
04 / What's differentDiscipline as a strategy
Most quick-commerce startups compete on how fast they can spend. Krave Mart competed on how slowly. A year after its pre-seed, the company was pointing out that more than 60% of the $6 million was still in the bank. That is an unusual thing to brag about. It also reported that roughly half of its dark stores had reached profitability while much of the category was still deep in the red, and that it was operationally breaking even on delivery costs, with about three in four customers actually paying a shipping fee.
The other difference is ownership. By making private-label staples - produce, eggs, bread, lentils, rice, sugar - Krave Mart controls both the shelf and the margin. Delivery is often a race to zero. The company that makes the rice is not in that race. The plan was ambitious: get private-label items into a large share of orders, so that every basket carried a little more margin than a basket of pure branded goods ever could.
Set that against the competition and the contrast sharpens. Pakistan's grocery and on-demand landscape has included Foodpanda's pandamart, wholesale-focused players such as Bazaar and Dastgyr, and app-first grocers like GrocerApp - each solving a slightly different slice of the same problem. Krave Mart's wager was that the winner would not be whoever delivered fastest or discounted hardest, but whoever could keep the unit economics honest long enough to still be standing when the subsidies dried up.
05 / ProductsAn app, a warehouse network, a private label
There are really three products stacked on top of each other. The first is the consumer app on iOS and Android, the friendly surface where the 4,500 items live. The second is the dark-store network, the unglamorous logistics layer that most customers never see. The third is the private-label range, the margin engine. In January 2026 a fourth surface appeared: inDrive.Groceries, grocery delivery built directly into the inDrive ride-hailing app, powered by Krave Mart's stores - launching in Karachi with more than 7,500 items, 20-to-30-minute delivery and free delivery over 499 rupees.
06 / The peopleAn ex-Daraz operating crew
Krave Mart was founded by four people who had already run large parts of the region's e-commerce machine. CEO Kassim Shroff is a two-time founder - his earlier company Gobabu was acquired - who spent years at Daraz, the Alibaba-owned marketplace, where he helped scale operations from 10,000 orders to about 4 million. His co-founders Hammad Bawany, Mohammad Ahsan Kidwai and Ch Haziq Ahmed brought their own time at Daraz, Foodpanda, Alibaba, Swvl and Unilever. This was not a first-timers' bet on a trend. It was operators building the thing they already knew how to run.
More than 60% of the pre-seed was still in the bank a year after raising it. In a funding culture obsessed with the raise, they celebrated the runway.
07 / The modelOwn the inventory, own the outcome
Krave Mart runs a first-party retail model. It buys stock, holds it in its own dark stores, and sells it directly to customers, earning retail margin plus delivery fees rather than a marketplace commission. Private label lifts the gross margin; the break-even target on delivery keeps the last mile from eating the business alive. It is closer to a modern supermarket chain that happens to have no storefronts than to a pure software platform - and that physical, ownable infrastructure is exactly what made it worth acquiring.
08 / The marketWhy a ride-hailing giant went shopping
Which brings us to inDrive. The global ride-hailing company - the scrappy competitor to Uber built on letting riders and drivers negotiate fares - has been assembling a super app for Pakistan, the familiar bundle of mobility, payments and everyday shopping in one place. It launched inDrive.Groceries with Krave Mart in early 2026, then moved to buy the company outright in a reported ~$45 million all-stock deal, cleared by the Competition Commission of Pakistan, after an initial $10 million injection through its new ventures arm.
Read the acquisition backwards and Krave Mart's whole strategy makes sense. A super app can build an app. What it cannot easily build overnight is a working grocery supply chain - the warehouses, the riders, the private label, the hard-won unit economics. Krave Mart spent four disciplined years building precisely the part that is expensive to buy and impossible to fake. In a category littered with well-funded failures, being boring turned out to be the most valuable thing it could be.
For inDrive, the fit is neat. It already has millions of Pakistani riders opening its app for transport; adding groceries gives those same users a second daily reason to return, and gives its riders a second thing to carry. For Krave Mart, folding into a larger platform solves the distribution problem that no amount of operational discipline can fully crack alone - the sheer cost of getting a new customer to download yet another app. Groceries and mobility keep converging into single apps around the world for exactly this reason, and Karachi is now on that map.
The tidy version of the Krave Mart story is that patience won. The more useful version is that it picked the right thing to be patient about. Plenty of startups are slow by accident. Krave Mart was slow on delivery speed so it could be fast on the things that compound - assortment, basket size, private-label margin, store-level profitability. That is not a moral about virtue. It is a reminder that in a hard market, the boring numbers are the strategy, and the company that respects them tends to be the one still trading when the noise stops.