Saving private Dunzo: Where’s the white knight?

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₹200," the executive, who declined to be named, said. That concierge service was the earliest version of Dunzo Digital Pvt. Ltd, now a popular quick commerce company, that almost became a unicorn, or a company with a valuation of over a billion dollars, last year.

In January 2022, Dunzo was valued at about $775 million. In its avatar as a concierge service provider, Dunzo would pick up groceries and deliver them at your apartment; drop off forgotten items at your office; make copies of house keys; pick up your car from the garage and even deliver bouquets to a friend. But there were too many workflows and all of them were on WhatsApp.

With some seed funding, the company moved from WhatsApp to an app. The human concierge service was replaced by technology. In this iteration, Dunzo restricted itself to being a logistics provider—it would pick and drop items as required by users.

This service took off and it scaled rapidly. At the height of the startup capital boom, in mid-2021, Dunzo added quick commerce to its product offerings and raised money from the likes of Reliance Retail Ventures Ltd and Google LLC. Overall, Dunzo raised close to $470 million till date.

Quick commerce is delivery of groceries in quick time, often within an hour of placing an order. Back then, the pivot to quick commerce made sense— almost a fourth of its orders were grocery deliveries. But quick commerce is also a double-edged sword.

Scale comes at a steep cost. In 2021-22, Dunzo’s revenue doubled to ₹54.3 crore. The loss? ₹465 crore.

The company gained scale on the back of its quick delivery business ‘Dunzo Daily’ but was losing money on every order. Then, simply, it ran out of money. Nine years after Biswas co-founded Dunzo along with Ankur