For a company that sells vegetables, Ninjacart's most revealing number is one it chose to shrink. Its operating revenue fell from about Rs 2,007 crore to Rs 1,634 crore in FY25, roughly 19 percent, and the company said so on purpose: it was walking away from low-margin, non-core business.
That is a very particular kind of decision for a founder-led startup. Growth is the story investors want. Ninjacart told them the opposite, that the way to a profit was a smaller company.
Ninjacart told them the opposite, that the way to a profit was a smaller company.
The company's founders have given few interviews that could be verified, and the personal side of this story is thin. Nothing about childhood, family or first jobs could be confirmed from the sources read. What can be said is what the business is. Ninjacart began in Bengaluru in 2015 as a farm-to-retail supply chain: buy produce from farmers, move it quickly, and sell it to the small shops and restaurants that cannot afford waste. Accel and Nandan Nilekani were among its early backers, and it later drew bigger money from names reported to include Flipkart and Walmart.
The model is brutal. Fresh produce rots. Margins are thin. Every rupee saved on a middleman has to cover trucks, crates and spoiled tomatoes. Scale makes it better and scale also makes it worse.
The reckoning came in FY25. The loss stayed near Rs 256 crore, almost flat against the year before, even as revenue dropped. Management says its core businesses are now profitable at the operating level and that the company as a whole should break even in 2026-27. In 2025 it raised a first slice of $6 million from Accel and Nilekani and said it was aiming for an IPO within two years.
Not everyone is persuaded. Falling sales with a flat loss is not the picture investors usually want before a listing, and the claim of operating profit is the company's own.
For a first-time founder, the lesson is in the retreat. A supply-chain business can become big by taking every order and still lose on each one. The harder, less glamorous skill is knowing which customers to stop serving, and saying it out loud while the world is watching the top line.