Zomato's Fresh Menu

AS THE COMPANY MOVES TO GENERATE REVENUES OUTSIDE FOOD DELIVERY, THE PROPORTION IS STARTING TO SHIFT. IT  IS NOW BANKING ON BUSINESSES LIKE BLIN KIT AND HYPERPURE TO POWER ITS GROWTH

- KRISHNA GOPALAN

DEEPINDER GOYAL WAS ready to put everything on the line. It was a blistering May afternoon in 2022, and the Zomato Co-founder & CEO was engrossed in discussions about a potential buyout of quick commerce player Blinkit with CFO Akshant Goyal at the Co-founder’s farmhouse in Delhi. If the deal went through, the Gurugram-headquartered company would gain a foothold in the growing quick commerce space. The hitch was the asking price.

“Akshant and I knew investors would not like it, but we decided to go for it. Our logic was if someone else did it three years later, it would have hurt since we had the money but succumbed to investor pressure,” says 41-year-old Goyal, an IIT Delhi alumnus. The duo thought that the worst that could happen would be that they would get fired. But it made sense to go all in. “It was a paradoxical situation since we could see the opportunity but did not want people to know since the competition was bigger than us,” says Goyal. What complicated matters further was that the Zomato stock was down by a third since its listing in July 2021. “Our necks were on the line, and we were doing this right in the middle of a downturn,” says Akshant, 40, an IIM Bangalore alumnus, who has been with Zomato for nearly seven years. The all-stock deal was sealed in June 2022 at $569 million (then ₹4,447 crore). It has been one and a half years since. Both have retained their jobs; Zomato has posted three consecutive quarters of profit (for Q3FY24, it posted net profit of ₹138 crore and total income of ₹3,507 crore); and investors are loving the stock (it has gained more than 30% since its listing). And, the new-look Zomato is expanding beyond its core online food delivery space, banking on businesses like Blinkit and Hyperpure (a B2B platform for kitchen supplies).