Zepto hits $5 billion valuation in latest big India commerce bet – Times of India

Indian online grocer Zepto’s valuation climbed about 40% to $5 billion in a funding round led by General Catalyst Partners, marking the latest major bet by foreign investors in the country’s e-commerce market.
New investors Dragon Fund and Epiq Capital participated in the $340 million round, Zepto said in a statement late Thursday. Existing backers including Lightspeed Venture Partners and DST Global stepped up their stakes.
The Mumbai-based startup last raised $665 million in June from new investors including private equity firm Avenir and Lightspeed.That round valued the firm at $3.6 billion.
India’s e-commerce sector is attracting investment at a time Paytm’s regulatory issues and edtech firm Byju’s insolvency proceedings are spooking startup financiers. In May, Alphabet Inc’s Google placed a $350 million bet on Walmart Inc’s Flipkart, banking on a fast-rising middle class.
Zepto is adding users as more consumers go online in one of the fastest-growing major economies. Zepto plans to double warehouses to more than 700 by March 2025 by reinvesting sales from mature dark stores, or warehouses, and is preparing to go public soon, the company has previously said.
Childhood friends Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra dropped out of Stanford’s computer science program and returned to India to build the startup in 2021, when they were teenagers.
Zepto competes in India’s hyper-competitive, low-margin but high volume grocery delivery space. Rivals in the market include e-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc’s India unit and homegrown competitors such as SoftBank Group Corp-backed Swiggy Ltd, publicly-traded Zomato Ltd, and conglomerate Tata Group’s BigBasket.