Zepto: Success Story Of Two College Dropouts Who Established A Million-Dollar Startup

Many of us had thought of starting our own business venture in our college days but only a few managed to keep up with their startup dreams. The founders of Zepto, Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra also gave up everything to follow their passion of business at a very young age and eventually became successful entrepreneurs, establishing a million-dollar venture, particularly in the critical times of COVID-19.

In this blog, we will tell you how these two teenagers started Zepto and what challenges they faced in their journey.

How did it begin?

The journey of Zepto was begun with two youngsters – Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra who were childhood pals and even went to the same university together. Palicha and Vohra had both enrolled at Stanford to earn a Computer Science degree. However, after a while, the two young men realised that their dreams were more important than any degree at that moment. Therefore, Palicha and Vohra had dropped out from college to follow their business passion. They returned to India for a break shortly before the coronavirus pandemic engulfed the entire world.

The teenagers, who previously worked on a number of projects, including a ride-hailing commute App for school kids, suddenly found themselves locked in their homes in Mumbai. As the pandemic raged, the two continued to struggle to get their grocery supplies. Even though the Indian government categorised grocery deliveries as “Essentials”, the nation was still battling to get the necessary provisions amid the outbreak of cases.

That’s when Palicha and Vohra realised the online play of Indian grocery delivery space, which is one of the largest sectors in the world, was grappling with some gross execution errors in the times of COVID-19 lockdown. Hence, they worked on their previous business model KiranaKart, which was also a grocery delivery platform, made some amendment, and then came up with an idea of Zepto in April 2021. Zepto was primarily focused on delivering grocery in 10 minutes or less.

Success of Zepto

The founders of Zepto didn’t succeed overnight. Though, their brand gained a lot of popularity in a short span of time, Palicha and Vohra had their fair share of struggles in the last few months. There is no denying in saying that Zepto is new in the business of online grocery shopping but so are its competitors. Almost all of its competitors are new and they are also in the initial stage. Startups like Blinkit, Swiggy Instamart, Dunzo, Big Basket, etc. are also delivering groceries within a few minutes just like Zepto. Hence, Zepto had to come up with a strong marketing strategy to outperform its rivals.

Today, Zepto operates in the top cities like Bangalore, Delhi, Gurgaon, Chennai and Hyderabad, and is planning to expand soon in Pune and Kolkata. To make sure that the Zepto customers get the on-time delivery of their groceries, it has set up a maze of over 100 dark stores across these cities that are optimized for fast deliveries. The company is currently valued at $570 Million and it is adding more than 1 lakh new customers to the platform almost every week.

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