The funding led by current backers Glade Brook Capital, Nexus Venture Partners and StepStone Group additionally noticed new traders Avenir, Lightspeed and Avra be a part of the startup’s cap desk.The funding will enhance the startup’s steadiness sheet as it goals for a public itemizing in 2025, co-founder & CEO Aadit Palicha advised TOI.
“We want to have a healthy balance sheet going into the IPO. We do not have any intent to spend the capital needlessly. The ambition to go for an IPO is within 2025 but it would depend on where the capital markets are at that time,” Palicha mentioned.
The fast commerce house has been rising in India, helped by demand from millennials and GenZs, lots of whom usually don’t make deliberate purchases and find yourself ordering a number of instances a month from platforms like Zepto which supply doorstep deliveries in 10-Quarter-hour. Zepto competes with Zomato’s Blinkit, Swiggy Instamart and Tata’s BigBasket out there, which has shortly expanded past groceries. Currently, Blinkit leads the house with a 40-45% market share, analysts mentioned.
The funding for Zepto comes at a time when gamers like Walmart’s Flipkart and Reliance’s JioMart are set to enter the house, intensifying competitors. The funding additionally signifies a revival of late-stage offers within the startup house the place movement of enormous investments have been tepid.
“We are getting this financing because we have executed quite well. We have been able to grow our sales and are quite close to overall ebitda break-even,” Palicha mentioned. Ebitda refers to earnings earlier than curiosity, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation. Zepto claimed that its gross merchandise worth (or the worth of products offered on its platform) stood at $1 billion in FY24.
The startup is now seeking to increase into about 10 cities with launches deliberate in Jaipur, Chandigarh, Ahmedabad and Coimbatore in about a few months. Besides, it should work on increasing number of merchandise on the platform and take its darkish retailer depend to 700 from 350 by March 2025.
“About 75% of our stores are generating profits. We will keep reinvesting the profits we are making from our matured stores back into the business,” mentioned Palicha.
