Right now is not the time to slow down: Zepto co-founder and CEO Aadit Palicha

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Zepto is well on its way to touch annualized sales of $3 billion in the next month or two, Aadit Palicha, Zepto co-founder and chief executive, told Mint, underscoring the firm’s potential for rapid growth that has attracted investors from around the world. Zepto’s dark stores are turning profitable at a faster pace as the firm is adding newer categories with a higher average order value, which is adding to its bottom line.

“Right now, is not the time to slow down," Palicha said in an interview with Mint. On Friday, Zepto raised $350 million, the largest domestic fundraise in the history of India's startup ecosystem Edited excerpts: We've closed this financing not because we needed cash. Before this financing, we had around a billion dollars, and now we've got $1.3 billion of cash in the bank.

So, we do not do this financing round with the objective of trying to raise more capital. The financing was done very candidly to increase domestic ownership. And that is exactly what we were able to achieve.

We pulled off the largest domestic fundraise for a startup in Indian history. And we are moving towards domestic ownership next fiscal year. The reason why we were able to raise a billion dollars of capital earlier this financial year is because we turned 70% of our dark stores profitable.

The stores are now turning profitable faster. It used to take about 23 months for a store to turn profitable and now it takes about eight months. And the capital being spent for each store to turn profitable was also getting lower.

It used to take about ₹3.9 crore of capex in operating burn for a store to turn profitable. Now it only takes about ₹1.5 crore. In a nutshell, we had gone from zero to over $1