
After a decade building software at Microsoft, Vineet Rao co-founded DealShare around a different customer: the household watching every rupee. A WhatsApp experiment in Jaipur became a venture-backed grocery business, then faced the harder arithmetic of scale.

He learned retail in a village shop, taught convenience stores to double as grocery depots, and watched China’s internet giants copy the idea. Now Yue Lihua’s hardest lesson is about the virtue of getting smaller.

He began with a warehouse, learned why supermarket data lies, and built Homesome around a stubborn idea: the neighborhood grocer should own the digital relationship too.