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Zepto IPO
Zepto Limited (formerly Kiranakart Technologies Limited)zepto.com
AnnouncedMainboardConsumer DiscretionaryBSE · NSE
- Price band
- —
- Issue size
- ₹12,000 Cr
- Lot size
- —
- Bidding
- —
- Grey market
- —
Face value ₹5.00
67% fresh capital
Listing date to be set
No quote recorded
The question this issue poses
In one sentence
Zepto has built the growth half of a quick-commerce business — revenue went from ₹4,454.5 Cr to ₹22,623.58 Cr in two years — and has not yet built the margin half. The loss widened to ₹5,905.19 Cr in FY26 even as the loss per order nearly halved, and the offer has been paused rather than priced while public investors decide what a ten-minute delivery network that still consumed ₹3,462.4 Cr of operating cash in a year is worth.
IPOVista score
How this issue scores, and why
Every pillar opens to show the raw metric, the curve it was mapped through, the sub-score and its weight. Disagree with the weighting if you like — the arithmetic is all here.
47Mixed
IPOVista score 47 out of 100, graded Mixed.IPOVista score
Scaling fast, not yet earning
34% of the scoring model was backed by disclosed data for Zepto, giving low confidence. Weights for anything missing were redistributed rather than scored as zero.
PillarScoreWeight
Below the line: market sentiment. Capped at 8 of 100 points so a hot grey market can tilt a score but never carry one.
Read this before the number
Loss-making in the latest full year
The company reported a net loss of ₹5905.2 Cr in FY26. P/E is undefined, so valuation is scored on sales instead of earnings.
The IPOVista Score is a transparent summary of disclosed fundamentals and issue terms. It is research, not investment advice, and it cannot predict listing performance.
The company
What the business actually does
Founded 2020 · Mumbai, Maharashtra (registered office); corporate office in Bengaluru · 53,223 employees
Zepto is a quick-commerce platform: customers order groceries and everyday essentials on an app and a rider brings them in roughly ten minutes. The delivery promise is made possible by dark stores — small, closed micro-warehouses placed inside dense neighbourhoods and stocked for that neighbourhood's demand. As of the March 2026 quarter Zepto ran 1,139 of them across 66 cities, each carrying about 49,602 SKUs and handling around 2,140 orders a day, with a median delivery time of 12.35 minutes and an average delivery distance down to 1.78 km. It served 47.97 million annual transacting users and fulfilled 640.18 million orders in FY26 through about 286,670 active delivery partners. The company was incorporated as Kiranakart Technologies in December 2020 by Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra, then both 19 and both Stanford dropouts, launched the Zepto brand in 2021, renamed the parent entity in 2025 and converted to a public limited company in December 2025 ahead of the listing.
Three revenue lines, and only one of them is profitable. Product sales — Zepto buying inventory and selling it on at a mark-up — were ₹17,588 Cr of FY26 operating revenue, about 78%. Warehousing, packaging and last-mile fees charged to marketplace sellers added ₹2,780 Cr, and platform services another ₹564 Cr. The line that matters for the margin story is advertising: ₹1,636 Cr in FY26, up from ₹651 Cr in FY25 and ₹49 Cr in FY24, now larger than the company's own ₹1,389 Cr of advertising spend. The structural problem is in between: FY26 gross margin was 19.6% against delivery and storage costs of 23.0%, so every order still loses money before any head-office cost. Gross profit as a share of net realisable value has recovered to 18.56% in FY26 from 12.80% in FY25, having been 18.77% in FY24. Fixed costs scale with the store count rather than with orders, which is why the disclosed metric management points at is adjusted EBITDA per order — −₹84.64 in FY24, −₹136.15 in FY25, −₹78.75 in FY26 and −₹59.40 in the March 2026 quarter. There are no bank borrowings; the leverage is ₹2,710 Cr of lease liabilities against 1,139 leased dark stores.
What makes it hard to copy
A 1,139-store dark-store estate across 66 cities, each carrying an average 49,602 SKUs in the March 2026 quarter, is what lets a single store turn 2,140 orders a day at a 12.35-minute median delivery time.
Where the revenue comes from
Share of revenue by reportable segment, latest full year
- Sale of traded goods77.7%
- Warehousing, packaging and last-mile charges12.3%
- Advertisement revenue7.2%
- Platform services2.5%
- Other (2)0.2%
Hover or focus a segment for its share and what it covers.
Where it operates
- Dark stores (all leased; 36.61% operated by Growth Partners rather than directly)1,139
66 cities across India
- Warehouses (operated by third-party logistics providers)75
India
- Registered office1
Andheri East, Mumbai, Maharashtra
- Corporate office1
Kaikondarahalli, Sarjapur Main Road, Bengaluru, Karnataka
0.0% of revenue is earned outside India.
Markets served
India
Who runs it
- Aadit PalichaManaging Director and Chief Executive Officer · since 2025Co-founder and promoter; with the company since incorporation in December 2020. Current directorship from 4 February 2025. Leads overall strategy and operations.
- Kaivalya VohraWhole-Time DirectorCo-founder and promoter; also President — Technology and Product, responsible for technology and product strategy. With the company since incorporation.
- Ramesh BafnaChief Financial Officer · since 2023Also a Whole-Time Director. CFO since 15 May 2023; previously CFO of Myntra and a senior director at Flipkart.
- Paul HudsonChairman and Non-Executive Nominee Director · since 2025On the board since 5 December 2025. Founder and chief investment officer of Glade Brook Capital Partners; takes no remuneration or sitting fees.
- Akhil GuptaIndependent DirectorFellow of the ICAI with over 38 years in general management, finance and telecom; also on the boards of AceVector and Bharti AXA Life Insurance.
The company on paper
- Legal name
- Zepto Limited (formerly Kiranakart Technologies Limited)
- Incorporated
- 5 Dec 2020
- CIN
- U46909MH2020PLC351339
- Sector
- Consumer Discretionary · Quick commerce — 10-minute grocery and essentials delivery
- Employees
- 53,223
- Registered office
- Hiranandani Lighthall, A Wing, 6th Floor, Saki Vihar Road, Andheri East, Mumbai 400 072, Maharashtra
- Statutory auditor
- S.R. Batliboi & Associates LLP, Chartered Accountants
- Promoters
- Aadit Palicha, Kaivalya Vohra, Lazarus Trust, The Vohra Trust
- Website
- zepto.com
The numbers
Financial performance
Revenue has compounded at 125.4% a year across the 3 reported financial years.
Revenue and profit
Figures in ₹ crore, as reported in the prospectus. Interim quarters are not annualised.
- Revenue
- Profit after tax
Margin trend
Profit and operating margin as a percentage of revenue
- Net margin
- EBITDA margin
Profit against cash generated
Profit after tax and net cash from operating activities, in ₹ crore. The figure under each period is cash generated per ₹100 of profit.
- Profit after tax
- Operating cash flow
Above 100% the business collects more cash than it books as profit. Persistently below it, growth is being funded out of working capital.
The price
Valuation
Ratios as disclosed in the prospectus, calculated at the upper end of the price band. P/E is always shown on post-issue earnings so issues stay comparable with each other.
The company is loss-making, so there are no earnings to price
2 listed companies the prospectus names itself
What you pay
Earnings and sales behind one share, and the multiple the band asks for them.
- EPS, pre-issue (FY26)
- —
- EPS, post-issue
- —
- Price / sales
- —
- Net asset value per share
- —
What it earns on what it has
Returns and margins. These are the figures that say whether the multiple above is deserved.
- Return on net worth
- —
- Return on capital employed
- —
- EBITDA margin
- —
- Net margin
- −26.1%
What it owes
Gearing at the latest balance-sheet date.
- Debt to equity
- —
Valuation against listed peers
P/E against operating margin
The peer table does not carry both a P/E and an operating margin for enough companies to plot.
The terms
How the issue is structured
67% of the money raised is fresh capital that goes to the company; the rest goes to shareholders selling down.
- Fresh issue
- ₹8,010 Cr
- Offer for sale
- —
- Total issue size
- ₹12,000 Cr
- Shares offered in the OFS
- 11,34,66,566
- Pre-issue shares outstanding
- —
- Employee discount
- None
Use of proceeds
Stated objects of the fresh issue, largest first
- General and unallocated
- Invested in growth
- Funding inorganic growth through unidentified acquisitions and other strategic initiatives — amount not quantified in the prospectus
- General corporate purposes — amount not quantified in the prospectus
Hover or focus an object to see whether that spending grows the business or repairs the balance sheet.
67% of the quantified proceeds is earmarked for growth; the rest repairs the balance sheet or is unallocated.
Demand
What the market is bidding
Subscription is hard exchange data. Grey-market premium is not — it is an unofficial quote, shown because readers want it and labelled because it deserves the label.
Subscription by category
Cumulative bid multiples
Bidding has not opened yet, so there is no subscription data to show.
Grey market premium
Unofficial over-the-counter sentiment
No grey-market quotes have been recorded for this issue.
Work it out
What this means for one application
Three calculations, each stating the assumption it rests on.
What one application costs
Shares are applied for in whole lots at the cut-off price. The full amount is blocked in your bank account under ASBA, not debited, until allotment.
The lot size and price band are not fixed yet, so there is nothing to calculate.
Odds of getting an allotment
When the retail category is oversubscribed, SEBI requires a lottery for the minimum lot. Every application has the same chance, whatever its size.
Retail subscription figures are not available yet, so there is nothing to estimate from.
What the grey market implies
Arithmetic on an unofficial quote. The grey market has no clearing house and no obligation to settle — this is sentiment made numeric, not a forecast.
No grey-market quote has been recorded for this issue.
Our read
The case for and against
Grounded only in figures disclosed in the prospectus. This is analysis, not a recommendation.
What works
- Revenue more than doubled in FY26, up 103.6% to ₹22,623.58 Cr, after a 149% rise the year before — a little over five times in two years from ₹4,454.5 Cr.
- Unit economics are improving on the company's own disclosed metric: adjusted EBITDA per order moved from −₹136.15 in FY25 to −₹78.75 in FY26, and −₹59.40 in the March 2026 quarter.
- Advertising, the high-margin line, reached ₹1,636 Cr in FY26 from ₹651 Cr in FY25 and ₹49 Cr in FY24, and now exceeds the company's own ₹1,389 Cr of advertising spend.
- Cash burn fell in absolute terms while the business doubled: net cash used in operations was ₹3,462.4 Cr in FY26 against ₹4,624.8 Cr in FY25 and ₹1,097.9 Cr in FY24.
- Store productivity is rising, not just store count: orders per store per day went from 1,325 in FY24 to 1,677 in FY26 and 2,140 in the March 2026 quarter, with SKUs per store roughly four times the FY24 level at 49,602.
- Founders Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra are not selling a single share, and ₹8,010 Cr of the issue is fresh capital that goes into the company rather than to existing holders.
- No bank borrowings at all — the only leverage is ₹2,710 Cr of lease liabilities against the dark-store estate.
What to weigh against it
- Loss in every year and widening in absolute terms: ₹1,214.8 Cr in FY24, ₹4,699.71 Cr in FY25, ₹5,905.19 Cr in FY26. FY26 total expenses of roughly ₹29,027 Cr exceeded total income of about ₹23,128 Cr.
- Gross margin does not yet cover fulfilment. FY26 gross margin was 19.6% against delivery and storage costs of 23.0% — the order is loss-making before any corporate cost is added.
- The competitive gap is the central number. On the offer document's own March-quarter comparison, Zepto did 210.01 million orders from 1,139 dark stores while Blinkit did 273.90 million from 2,243 stores, and Blinkit is reported close to break-even per order against Zepto's −₹59.40.
- The valuation mark has moved against the company. The last private round was struck around USD 7 billion in October 2025; by July 2026 institutional indications were reported in the USD 2.5–3 billion range, which is why the issue was paused rather than priced.
- Regulatory overhang on the founders: the Enforcement Directorate issued summons to both co-founders on 8 April 2026 under FEMA concerning foreign investment and shareholding, and the offer document states there is no assurance the matter will not lead to proceedings or penalties.
- Operational compliance exposure is disclosed at scale: 21 separate actions by Food Safety Officers across multiple states, and all 1,139 dark stores are leased rather than owned.
- About 286,670 active delivery partners sit in a gig-worker model that is itself the subject of evolving Indian labour regulation, and delivery and handling costs doubled to ₹3,046.3 Cr in FY26.
- Free cash flow was −₹4,329 Cr in FY26, so the operating improvement has not yet reached the cash line after capital spending.
- The market-sizing used in the offer document comes from a Redseer report commissioned and paid for by Zepto, which the document itself discloses.
Easy to miss in the prospectus
- No price band and no dates exist, and the issue is not open. The ₹10,000–12,000 Cr range here spans what different outlets have reported as the expected size — only the fresh issue is fixed, at ₹8,010 Cr; the rest depends on what price ends up on the 11,34,66,566 shares in the offer for sale.
- The draft is still live with SEBI. The offer was paused in mid-2026, not withdrawn, so terms could reappear without a fresh filing.
- Adjusted EBITDA per order is the only disclosed series that has improved in a straight line — −₹84.64, −₹136.15, −₹78.75, then −₹59.40 in Q4 FY26. It is also an adjusted figure, so reported EBITDA is deliberately left blank in this record rather than mixing the two.
- The March 2026 quarter matters more than the full year: ₹7,497.64 Cr of revenue in one quarter against ₹22,623.58 Cr for the whole of FY26.
- ₹1,734.94 Cr of the fresh issue — more than the ₹1,628.98 Cr going into new dark stores — is earmarked for lease rentals and licence fees on stores that already exist. Using primary capital to pay operating rent is unusual and worth reading closely in the final prospectus.
- Employee benefit expense of ₹1,784.7 Cr in FY26 includes ₹557 Cr of ESOP charges, so a meaningful slice of the loss is non-cash.
- There is no like-for-like listed peer, and the offer document says so: Blinkit is a division of Eternal and Instamart a division of Swiggy. The peers shown here are the listed parents, whose consolidated numbers include food delivery and much else, so the P/E and margin columns are not a clean read-across.
- Warehousing costs rose 56% to ₹2,150 Cr in FY26 while orders went from 332.11 million to 640.18 million — the direction is right, but storage is the cost line that has to keep falling per order for the model to close.
Straight from the filing
Read it yourself
Every figure on this page comes out of these. Go and check them.
Served by the issuer, the exchange or the regulator — never a copy hosted here, so what you open is the filing itself.
The paperwork
Who is running the issue
- Lead managers
- Axis Capital Limited, Morgan Stanley India Company Private Limited, Goldman Sachs (India) Securities Private Limited, Motilal Oswal Investment Advisors Limited, HSBC Securities and Capital Markets (India) Private Limited, JM Financial Limited, IIFL Capital Services Limited
- Registrar
- KFin Technologies Limited
How these figures were checked
Built from 10 independently published accounts of this issue, agreeing with each other. No copy of the filing itself is linked here, so nothing on this page has been reconciled against the primary document — treat every figure as reported rather than verified.
The prospectus is the authoritative document. Check anything that matters against it before you act.
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