Teens quit Stanford to raise 60 million for grocery delivery app

Mumbai: The 10-minute grocery delivery app, Zepto, a startup by two teenage Stanford University dropouts, raised 60 million dollars in funding from investors, Zeto said in a statement on Sunday.

The startup, backed by Nexus Venture, Global Founders and Silicon Valley angel investors Lachy Groom and Neeraj Arora, has now investments by Y Combinator and Glade Brook Capital, Bloomberg reported.

The CEO and Co-founder of the firm Palicha told Bloomberg that Zepto is valued between 200 to 300 million dollars.

Zepto was founded earlier this year by 19-year-olds Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra. Both got admission into Stanford University's most prized computer science engineering programme last year, but they quit it to pursue entrepreneurship. They focused on grocery delivery- a field that flourished during the pandemic induced lockdown. The duo launched the service earlier this year.

Zepto would be competing with other more prominent online grocers such as Grofers, backed by SoftBank Group Corp, and Dunzo, supported by Google, for the rapid delivery segment known as Ouick Commerce and or Q -Commerce.

With a network of micro-warehouses known as cloud stores or dark stores, groceries will be delivered in 10 minutes and it is operational now in Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi. While the business is to expand in the three cities, the startup also has plans to initiate operations in Hyderabad, Pune, Kolkata and Chennai in the coming weeks.