Indian quick-commerce startup Zept has announced that it has raised $400 million in a funding round led by new investor, US-based pension fund California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS). The round is a combination of primary and secondary investments, with participation from existing investors including Avenir, Avra, Lightspeed, Glade Brook, The Stepstone Group, and Nexus Venture Partners. After this funding, the company plans to go public next year.
Zepto competes with other quick commerce players such as Eternal (formerly Zomato)’s BlinkIt, Swiggy Instamart and Tata-owned BigBasket. These are all part of listed companies. The startup is on a fundraising spree, having raised $1.3 billion in just a few months last year. Since Zepto’s last funding round in November 2024, Swiggy was listed on the Indian stock exchanges and Blinkit surpassed Zomato in gross order value (total customer orders) in Q1 2025.
The company also faces competition from traditional e-commerce players such as Flipkart and Amazon, which have launched their own quick-commerce delivery services.
Startups are also eyeing verticalized e-commerce services. Swish and Zing, both backed by Accelerator, operate in the food delivery space. Listed companies Nykaa, Flipkart-owned Myntra, Silk and Blip want to deliver apparel to customers within an hour. Powered by Lightspeed, Snabbit allows users to book home services like cleaning in under 10 minutes. And startups like FirstClub are taking a curation approach to grocery delivery.
Zepto and CEO Aadit Palicha are confident in the startup’s growth. Paricha said the company has grown from 500,000 orders per day five quarters ago to 1.7 million orders per day, and expects the growth to continue.
“A key metric for this funding round was our ability to bring our dark store to profitability while gaining more than 10 million new transacting users per month. Obviously, we invested in customer acquisition and store launches in stages. But even as you did that, we were able to keep our store profitable,” Paricha told TechCrunch.
BlinkIt, Instamart, and Zepto operate in many of these areas, most notably food delivery. However, Zepto had to temporarily suspend Zepto Cafe offerings in 44 cities due to staffing issues. The company did not say how many cities it has reopened, but said Zepto Cafe is a business with a run rate of more than $110 million and is growing rapidly.
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There are signs of a quick commerce market in India. Morgan Stanley predicts the quick commerce market could reach $42 billion by 2030. Bernstein said in a March memo that it could reach $100 billion in 10 years. The analyst firm also pointed out that in its target market, quick commerce is currently the main way people buy groceries.
Zepto has mainly focused on major cities of India in terms of expanding its services. JPMorgan pointed out earlier this month that BlinkIt has a dark store network of warehouses to fulfill online orders in over 204 cities in India, compared to Swiggy Instamart in over 104 cities and Zepto in over 80 cities. Zepto has over 1,000 stores in these cities and plans to add hundreds more over the next 12 months.
The company pointed out that while most of its business comes from big cities, it now receives nearly 20% of its total order volume from smaller cities.
On its app, Zepto focuses on showcasing services such as Super Saver, which offers extra discounts on groceries for bulk orders, and highlighting categories such as electronics, fashion, and decorative items. However, this resulted in a cluttered app. Palicha acknowledged that and said he will be making changes to the interface in the coming months to simplify the app.
This investment is notable for CalPERS. Pension funds typically invest in venture capital through intermediary funds, rather than leading direct investments in startups. CalPERS has been aggressively increasing its venture investments since 2022 after what officials called a “lost decade” of poor performance, increasing its venture investment allocation from about $800 million to a goal of $5 billion. The fund’s decision to lead a round in an Indian quick commerce startup appears to signal the institution’s strong confidence in India’s quick delivery sector, and perhaps signals Calpers’ growing appetite to make direct venture investments in emerging markets as well. Notably, CalPERS also invests in funds from Zepto’s existing backers, including Lightspeed and General Catalyst.
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