The Ledger, every show

“If anyone can build the largest business in internet in the country, it'll be online grocery.”

“We're sitting in a world where our mature dark stores are fully loaded, you know, turning fully loaded cashflow positive without exaggeration. And I know there's a lot of, you know, creativity in what's above and below, you know, those numbers, you know, can I…”

“If you look at Nielsen's data, the average time it takes for a DMART, Reliance Fresh, more retail, Spencer's retail, et cetera, all, I mean, all companies that we have a lot of respect for, take some 18 to 24 months to turn a new supermarket profitable. We're …”

“Both Kevali and I wake up every morning knowing that if we make the right decisions, we're sitting on that DMART level outcome of building a 30, forty billion dollar company.”

“Five years from now, I'll be talking to you saying, you know what, we're a highly profitable public company in grocery.”

“70% of our markets are profitable. The most mature markets are touching four to five percent EBITDA.”

“We've got an opportunity to build, you know, the largest, you know, grocery player in India, which it's, is a seven hundred billion dollar market, right? And so if I'm in that position, we can easily build 20, 25, thirty billion of top line,”

“We went from basically, like, close to zero in scale to, like, two hundred million in, in run rate scale in, like, six months, right?”

“We've gone from like a forty million ARR in ad revenue last year to this year, we've just crossed two hundred million ARR, right?”

“And so today, you know, greater than 50% of the tickets that are raised on Zepto, not just like a rules-based chatbot, are actually solved dynamically by a generative chatbot that's been modified for our exact use cases, right?”

“And yeah, from July, 21 to today, like about 24 months, went from about zero to like today north of 5000 crores in sales.”

“So look, I mean, we went from zero rupees in, in sales to thousands of crores of annual sales in the span of 1617 months.”

“And they are, you know, less than 10 X our size in sales, and we are growing multiples every year.”

“I think we crossed that milestone a while ago. That was a while ago, but I think obviously that doesn't mean that that net revenue is generating cash for us in the bottom bottom line. But I think we're in that territory have been for some time.”

“When we take our delivery times from 45 minutes to under 15 minutes, what we see with retention is two to three x goodness. NPS starts stabilizing at north of 85 points”

“Our cost of rent as a percentage of revenue for mature dark stores is about .7%, right?”

“Yeah, I think for us right now, it's roughly about three, 3.5% on picking and then blended with last mile goes to about 10, 11%.”

“We're seeing that as customers get more and more mature to on the platform, our end-state AUV AUB ends up being, you know, 40 to 45% higher by month six to month eight in the customer's journey with us, right?”

“What we've seen, post the fifth order on Zepto, the user's likelihood to retain, or sorry, even post the third order, the user's likelihood to retain indefinitely is post-ninety-five percent. Post the fifth order, and all the way to the 11th order, that starts…”

“For us, we're looking at today when you include all the different off invoice margin that we get from brands, you know, around four percent of revenue added there, and we'll probably increase that to five percent by July, August is what we're looking at right …”

“In this current growth rate, north of, you know, 20, twenty-five million by the end of this calendar year, and, you know, significantly more at the end of it, right?”

“A lot of the people that were in the market In the early days of grocery delivery in India, we're trying to build its supply chain backward instead of user backward or customer backward, right? And so they would build out models that were, you know, two hour d…”

“We had gone from zero in August of 2021 to two and a half years later, we had hit about a billion in GMV. And the business was actually pretty close back then to EBITDA and operating cash flow breakeven.”

“But even from a capital perspective, we went from, like, effectively the hundred, 125 K from YC to, like, a nine million dollar round To a fifty million dollar round to a hundred million dollar round in like four months.”

“So we've scaled that effectively starting last year and we've gone from zero to over a 100,000 orders per day.”

“We built out like our search stack in-house, the entire relevance engine, Bidding, attribution, campaign management, automated keyword suggestions. I think we've built out a really high quality performance ad stack out of India for one of the first players to …”

“We started training on Lama to try to build out a better, I mean, to basically build out the relevance engine in-house, and that gave us much better results, and we were able to surge the ads businesses out of that, so that had a big impact on bottom line”

“So he, so they, so he gave us basically a 50 K USD at a two and a half million valuation.”

“To give you the exact number, it would be like about today collectively .3% of grocery.”

“I mean, the overall round is about nine million. And then fifty million led by Gladebrook and then a hundred million led by Y Comrader. That was, I believe July, 21 to December, 21.”

“The average, you know, dark stores that do is operating north of a thousand orders per day today.”

“The overwhelming majority of consumption actually happens within four kilometers from your house, which is very different from the US, right? Like, the frequency of purchase in India is four times more for grocery than it is in, in the US, and so people actual…”

“In the early days when you're delivering like in an hour. And so, people would use the app. The next week, three, four percent of people use it again.”

“And, you know, today we're doing not like, you know, 708 hundred products. We're doing now almost 45,000 to 50,000 products that you can order. Everything from like, you know, oranges and apples all the way to earphones and hoodies.”

“Because it was like the only unicorn round in India for that year.”

“It was actually the first location, the first dark store we launched was in a neighborhood in Mumbai called Bandra. And pretty quickly that neighborhood became bigger for us than the rest of the entire city that we were operating in.”

“Today we've got, like, 3000 plus corporate employees, right? And mainly ops folks”

“So, by within 30 days of launching, 30 to 40 days, we got to about 300 orders a day.”

“When you were 16, we actually started something that was fairly interesting. It was Right sharing platform for school commutes. And, you know, we launched that in Dubai and it ended up scaling to a couple thousand users and, you know, quite a few schools in th…”

“We started growing a hundred, 150% month on month, which is not for the faint hearted.”

“75% of all, you know, consumer white goods spending in this country happens in grocery.”

“So we just decided to hack around, work on a project, and it just started off as like a WhatsApp group where we were delivering groceries for our neighbors, because it was a nightmare to get groceries in the first wave of the pandemic.”

“Obviously in the US you've got more Walmarts and Costco's and Kroger's but in India it's primarily these small mom and pop shops that, that dominate grocery.”