Teenage Entrepreneurs Offer Speedy Delivery
Aadit Palicha and his childhood friend Kaivalya Vohra, both 19, dropped out of Stanford University to create an Indian grocery delivery company that’s now worth almost a billion dollars.
“How many people in their lifetimes get an opportunity to build a potential generational company? We figured that was just a more exciting opportunity than studying in an elite university,” Palicha told CNBC Make It.
[Left] Aadit Palicha , [Right] Kaivalya Vohra
In May 2022, nine months after the partners launched the grocery delivery app Zepto, they received $200 million in funding, an investment that increased the company’s valuation to $900 million.
The company has set itself apart from competitors by promising to deliver groceries in under 10 minutes. That may seem a tall task in cities like Mumbai and Delhi with heavy traffic. But the company has managed to cut delivery distances to under 2 kilometers by setting up hundreds of dark stores in 10 major cities.
Dark stores are filled with grocery items ready for delivery. Thousands of delivery workers pick up goods in the stores, which aren’t open to the public.
“We design our network across the city, to make sure that our points of pickup are very close to population clusters in a specific neighborhood,” Palicha said. “What ends up happening is that the average distances of our deliveries are so short, we’re able to get deliveries done consistently in 10 minutes.”
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Compiled and partly written by Indian humorist MELVIN DURAI, author of the novel Bala Takes the Plunge.
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