Zepto raises $450 million at $7 billion valuation as Indian quick commerce market heats up

Summary

Indian quick commerce startup Zepto said it has raised $400 million in a funding round led by a new investor, California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), a U.S.-based pension fund. The round, which is a mix of primary and secondary investment, also has participation from existing investors, including Avenir, Avra, Lightspeed, Glade Brook, The Stepstone Group, and Nexus Venture Partners. After this funding, the company plans to go public next year. Zepto competes with other quick commerce players such as Eternal’s (formerly Zomato) BlinkIt, Swiggy Instamart, and Tata-owned BigBasket — all part of publicly listed companies. The startup has been on a funding spree as it picked up $1.3 billion in a span of several months last year. Since Zepto’s last funding round in November 2024, Swiggy made its public debut on India’s stock exchange, and Blinkit surpassed Zomato in gross order value (the total value of customer orders) for Q1 2025. The company also faces competition from legacy ecommerce players such as Flipkart and Amazon, which have started their own quick commerce delivery services. Startups are also looking at verticalized e-commerce offerings. Accel-backed Swish and Zing are operating in the food delivery space; publicly listed Nykaa, Flipkart-owned Myntra, Silkk, and Blip want to deliver apparel to customers in an hour; Lightspeed-backed Snabbit is allowing users to book home services like cleaning within 10 minutes; and startups like FirstClub are taking a curation approach to grocery delivery. Zepto and CEO Aadit Palicha are confident about the startup’s growth. Palicha said that the company has scaled from 500,000 daily orders five quarters ago to 1.7 million daily orders and predicted that the growth will continue. “The key metric for this round of funding was our ability to turn dark stores profitable while acquiring over 10 million new monthly transcating users. We obviously invested incrementally in customer acquisition and store launches. ...