Vohra built Zepto with fellow Stanford dropout Aadit Palicha when both were still teenagers. The two were childhood friends who left Stanford's computer science programme and returned to India in 2021 to build the company during the pandemic, betting that the convenience economy had room for grocery delivery measured in minutes rather than hours. Five years later, the company is preparing to list on India's stock exchanges with a roughly ₹8,010-crore fresh issue. Its updated draft prospectus, filed with markets regulator the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) this month, tells a story of a company racing on two fronts simultaneously: scaling fast enough to defend its lead in one of India's most capital-intensive consumer bets, and proving — quarter by quarter — that the economics of 10-minute delivery can eventually turn a profit. The warehouse floor where Vohra spends his afternoons scanning barcodes is, in effect, the testing ground for that second, harder argument: that automation, not just funding rounds, will determine who wins the quick-commerce race.
The filing shows Zepto handling roughly 2.33 million orders a day by the fourth quarter of its last fiscal year (Q4 FY26), generating net receivables value (NRV) of about ₹81,338.82 million — roughly ₹8,134 crore — in that quarter alone, on a base of nearly 48 million annual transacting users across more than 1,100 dark stores.
The more interesting story, for investors weighing the IPO, is what happened to the cost side. Total cost per order fell from ₹181 in Q2 FY26 to ₹128 in Q4 FY26 across just two quarters, and adjusted Ebitda per order — still negative — improved from a loss of ₹110 to a loss of ₹59 per order in the same period. Free cash flow per order followed a similar arc, narrowing from negative ₹110.8 to negative ₹46. None of those numbers mean Zepto is profitable. They mean the gap is closing, and closing fast enough that the company is willing to put the trend line in front of public-market investors.
That improvement is, in large part, a story about automation — the kind on display during a recent visit to the Mother Hub, where Zepto walked reporters through the systems and processes that move inventory from vendors and farmers to delivery trucks, then to dark stores and finally to rider bags in a matter of minutes. The automation is playing a key role in reducing cost per order through higher throughput rather than headcount reductions.
“Our orders per day per dark store have gone up from about 1,500 to 2,140 and this quarter it is even higher. From the same facilities, we're able to do a lot more orders. That's a major reason why cost per order is coming down,” Vohra told
Business Standard during the tour.
Kaivalya Vohra at the Mother Hub
The company's pitch to public investors rests on a claim made directly in its filing: that Zepto is the fastest-growing quick-commerce platform in India by order volume between FY24 and FY26 among scaled players, according to the Redseer report cited by the company.
Vohra said Zepto's competitive advantage stems from the technology, automation and data-driven systems running across its supply chain, warehouses and delivery network. “The delta between us and our peers is all this — the cost. Right now we're just talking about the back-end supply-chain cost. The same thing is true for the dark store and the last mile,” he said. He attributed the gains to incremental efficiencies across the supply chain that allow throughput to rise faster than fixed costs — a flywheel he said keeps cost per order falling.
According to Zepto's UDRHP, the company is investing in automation technologies including "Put to Light" sorting stations, linear sorters and automated weighing and packaging systems, while also using machine-learning models for demand forecasting and predictive inventory management. The filing says Zepto's in-house last-mile delivery platform manages functions ranging from rider onboarding and supply-demand matching to route optimisation using maps, traffic and weather data, helping improve productivity, delivery reliability and overall fulfilment efficiency. Looking ahead, Zepto said it is developing AI-powered warehouse picking and inventory placement, robotics for product movement and replenishment, voice-based shopping tools, and an AI-driven software development platform to further improve efficiency, scalability and margins.
The company's growth has not come without friction. Zepto's updated filing disclosed that both cofounders, Palicha and Vohra, were summoned this year by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) to provide certain information, according to the UDRHP. Zepto said both cofounders cooperated fully and supplied all requested documentation.
Zepto's corporate attrition rate also soared to 51.28 per cent in FY26, up from 40.48 per cent in FY25. The firm has also experienced a series of senior-level executive departures across various business verticals and operations.
What happens next will play out in two arenas: Sebi's review of the offer documents, and a market where quick-commerce players including Blinkit and Instamart are converging on the same smaller cities in search of growth. For investors, the key question is whether the automation, software and AI systems that have helped lower Zepto's cost per order can continue to improve its economics as the company scales. Back at the Mother Hub in Karnataka, the conveyor belts, robots, sorting machines and software dashboards offer a glimpse of what Zepto is really asking public-market investors to buy: not just a grocery-delivery app, but an increasingly automated logistics and technology platform.
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