In the middle of the 2020 lockdown, two teenagers sat behind a WhatsApp group and tried to deliver groceries to their neighbours. Aadit Palicha has said they were 17. Neither had finished a university term. Both had been admitted to Stanford.
Palicha grew up in Mumbai, fascinated by technology, and at 17 he had already built GoPool, a student carpool app in Dubai that never scaled. Kaivalya Vohra spent most of his childhood in Dubai, where he was deputy head boy at Dubai College, and was admitted to Stanford for computer science. Both attended orientation online, then came home within months. Vohra's parents have been described as among the earliest to believe in the idea.
The valuation went from $2.5 million to $7 billion in under five years.
The first company, KiranaKart, was built around neighbourhood kirana stores. It sounded smart and it failed. Delivery times were inconsistent, quality was unpredictable, and the founders could not fix what they did not own. After about ten months they shut it down.
What they did next was less glamorous and much harder. They took over the warehouses and the delivery themselves. The investor Contrary, which backed them in early 2021 with $730,000, had reportedly been willing to fund them only if they dropped out of Stanford. Y Combinator followed. In July 2021 they relaunched as Zepto, and by October it had a $60 million Series A. The valuation went from $2.5 million to $7 billion in under five years.
Speed had a price. Anand Mahindra called quick-commerce delivery inhuman for the people doing it in 2022. Funding froze in 2023 when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed and trapped operating cash. Aadit has acknowledged early hiring mistakes. From 2024, regulators and users questioned dark patterns and drip pricing, and in April and May 2026 both founders were summoned by the Enforcement Directorate over foreign exchange matters tied to their foreign investors, a fact disclosed in the IPO filing.
The company moved its headquarters from Mumbai to Bengaluru in 2024. It reported revenue of ₹22,624 crore for FY26, nearly double the year before, but losses of ₹5,905 crore. The IPO planned for July 2026 has been held off while it seeks about ₹1,000 crore in a pre-IPO round at a lower $4.5 billion valuation. The founders hold roughly 19.6 percent between them.
The founders learned the hard way that the first idea is rarely the one that survives. They discarded a model that used other people's shops and took on the weight of running everything themselves. Growth that fast can look like proof. Zepto's story is still a bet on whether it is.