Kiranakart Technologies Pvt. Ltd, the company behind Zepto, a 10-minute grocery delivery platform, has secured $200 million in a Series D fundraising round spearheaded by Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund, which valued the company at $900 million.
In addition to previous investors Nexus Venture Partners, Glade Brook Capital, and Lachy Groom, new investor Kaiser Permanente joined the round.
“Rather than optimising for a 10-15% higher valuation, we wanted to optimise for the right long-term partner, like Y Combinator. More importantly, we wanted to have enough cash in the bank where we are not affected by market sentiment cycles. it was not a tough round given Zepto’s focus on solid execution and reaching a high level of scale sustainably,” said Aadit Palicha, Zepto co-founder and chief executive.
The new funds will be used to expand sustainably across India, with hiring planned in engineering, analytics, operations, marketing, finance, and human resources.
Zepto employs over 1,000 people and has over 50,000 delivery partners. It intends to expand its workforce in the following year.
“Our rigorous focus on unit economics is the main reason why we’ve had such an amazing trajectory as a company. We have turned micro-markets profitable and brought down burn significantly while growing to a scale of hundreds of thousands of orders per day,” said Kaivalya Vohra, co-founder and chief technology officer, Zepto.
