Why Zepto's Aadit Palicha Turned Down Stanford to Deliver Groceries

Aadit Palicha, co-founder of Zepto, recounts how he and co-founder Kaivalya (KB) began delivering groceries to neighbors in Mumbai via a WhatsApp group during the first COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, when they were 17 years old and had deferred their plans to attend college in California. Rather than immediately dropping out of school, they spent roughly a year validating the business, only committing fully once they reached around 10,000 orders per day and a 60-70 crore GMV run rate, at which point they also had investor interest and a term sheet in hand.

The original product, called Kiranakart, involved doorstep delivery sourced from local mom-and-pop stores. Through direct conversations with customers at their doors, Aadit and KB discovered that no existing player — including themselves — was truly satisfying customers on the four key dimensions of speed, quality, selection, and price. This led to a pivotal decision to take control of the customer experience by building their own mini dark stores, starting literally in KB's apartment. The neighborhood served by this first dark store generated three to four times the volume of all other neighborhoods combined, validating the model decisively.

Aadit explains that the 10-minute delivery concept emerged from a first-principles thought exercise inspired by Brian Chesky's 'five-star to seven-star' framework: strip away all constraints, imagine the most extreme positive customer experience possible, and then work backwards to figure out how to make it feasible. Critics at the time argued that owning dark stores was not financially viable, but Zepto's approach generated far higher throughput than anyone anticipated, which in turn dramatically lowered per-unit costs — an outcome that was impossible to forecast without first achieving that level of customer delight.

On the operational side, Aadit emphasizes that Zepto is fundamentally a logistics and supply chain company — an 'atta-dal-travel company' in his words — not a software app. The company now employs over 200,000 people including pickers, packers, truck drivers, and delivery partners, and has built industrial-grade automation in its backend supply chain. Zepto is today the largest seller of fruits and vegetables in India on its platform, sourcing millions of units per week directly from farmers across the country.

Zepto has also developed a substantial advertising business worth hundreds of millions of dollars in ARR, where major brands like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Nestlé bid on search keywords. AI and machine learning are deeply embedded in operations: ML algorithms now run supply chain forecasting for millions of units per day without human intervention, and generative AI tools power the ads platform and internal engineering productivity. Aadit notes that Zepto has cut nearly all third-party SaaS and managed services spending by building in-house.

Looking ahead, Aadit envisions Zepto becoming India's homegrown equivalent of Amazon — a large-scale urban grocery infrastructure platform operating across the top 40-50 cities, enabling a new generation of consumer brands to be built on top of its platform, much as Walmart and Costco enabled brand creation in the US decades ago. He attributes his own rapid personal growth to surrounding himself with experienced, senior leaders who joined early and from whom he shamelessly asks even the most basic questions.