ETSA 2023 Comeback Kid Winner | We wanted to be in the driver's seat to control our destiny: ZopSmart’s Mukesh Singh
This is part of a series of interviews with the winners of The Economic Times Startup Awards 2023.
Unable to keep up with the fundraising capabilities of rivals Grofers (now Blinkit) and BigBasket, Mukesh Singh and the other two cofounders of ZopNow took the tough decision to shut their seven-year-old consumer-facing grocery-delivery platform in 2018.
Singh and his cofounders, Raj Pandey and Vikash Kumar, bought out their investors with their personal capital and transitioned ZopNow to a business-to-business (B2B) enterprise, offering its omnichannel retail expertise to retailers globally under a new name, ZopSmart.
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In four years, the company has recorded a strong profit pool. ZopSmart clocked a net profit of Rs 200 crore for the financial year ended March 31, 2023, on revenue of Rs 300 crore. It is now targeting 25-30% annual growth in business for the next five-six years before planning to raise external funds or going for M&As.
Taking note of its successful and extremely tough transition to a B2B model from B2C, the elite jury of The Economic Times Startup Awards 2023 selected ZopSmart as the winner of the Comeback Kid category.
Even though they folded up the ZopNow business in 2018, the founding team had conviction in the grocery delivery business and that it could be built in a sustainable manner, Singh told ET in an interview. “We knew our tech stack was quite strong and the
