In his second year at IIT Madras, Amrit Acharya built a vehicle out of scrap and won.
The contest was Bosch's Junkyard Wars. The prize was an internship, but the real reward was a taste of something his family had not planned for him. His parents, an insurance employee and an NGO worker, both Arts graduates, had wanted a doctor or an IAS officer. Engineering, he has said, was a late arrival in his life. His grandmother, who was very good at maths, had been his first maths tutor.
The prize was an internship, but the real reward was a taste of something his family had not planned for him.
He got into IIT Madras in 2006. After graduating he joined ITC, where his first assignment was to build a factory. He has described the odd range of the job: talking to the company's CEO in the morning and to the people on the factory floor in the afternoon. At ITC he also met the colleagues he would later start a company with, among them Srinath Ramakkrushnan, another IIT Madras alumnus, and Rahul Sharma.
Zetwerk was born in 2018 around a simple frustration. Large companies that needed machinery, steel structures and other custom parts had to hunt across thousands of small, scattered workshops. Quality was uneven, deadlines slipped. Zetwerk put itself in the middle, matching orders to factories and then policing the work.
The bet worked. In 2021 a $150 million round made it a unicorn, with money eventually crossing $900 million from names like Peak XV, Accel, Lightspeed, Greenoaks and D1.
The price came later. Revenue grew, but losses grew with it. In FY26 the company reported operating revenue of ₹15,913 crore, up 40 per cent, alongside a net loss of ₹1,606 crore. That loss carried a ₹796 crore exceptional charge and a ₹453 crore impairment in a civil infrastructure business it walked away from. Founders Acharya and Ramakkrushnan put up ₹600 crore of their own, raised through personal debt, to raise their stake. A dispute with a former senior executive and his company, Ayr Energy, over confidential information was settled in September 2026.
In October 2026 Zetwerk went public at ₹151 a share in a ₹5,012 crore issue, valuing it at roughly $2.7 billion, well below the near-$5 billion private talk of earlier years. It listed on 23 October at about ₹159, then slid to around ₹138 by the close.
For a first-time founder, the quiet lesson is in that first job. Acharya started by learning to speak to both the boardroom and the shop floor. A marketplace like his lives or dies on that fluency.