 "Zepto")
Quick commerce unicorn Zepto on Wednesday announced some changes in its organisation.
As a part of this change, Nikhil Mittal, who was Zepto's first employee and part of the engineering team, has been elevated to the position of Chief Technology Officer (CTO).
Mittal and Ankit Agarwal, chief product officer, will now report directly to co-founder Kaivalya Vohra, who earlier also held the position of CTO.
“Over the last two and a half years, we have built up one of the highest performing engineering teams in the country, in large part due to Nikhil. He has put us in a position where we have been able to scale our technology infrastructure, despite having limited resources,” Aadit Palicha, co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Zepto, told Business Standard.
In his new role, Mittal will be handling all verticals of engineering – customer facing, platforms and supply chain – at the company.
Also Read
“I joined Zepto on Day 1 and had the privilege of seeing this company scale from 0 to thousands of crores in just around 2 years! That being said, it still feels like Day 1 and I couldn’t be more excited to contribute to building Zepto into a generational company,” said Mittal.
Zepto has, of late, also been ramping up hiring in engineering roles.
“The biggest change is that we are hiring more people. We have hired 200 engineers over the past 29 months. We are scaling up the engineering team, hiring around one engineer every alternate day,” said Palicha.
In August last year, Zepto raised $200 million in a series E funding round at a $1.4 billion valuation to become a unicorn, ending an extended dry spell. The round was led by the StepStone Group, a Baltimore-based institutional asset manager, which is also a Limited Partner (LP) of existing investor Nexus Venture Partners.
The firm had previously raised $60 million in October 2021. In December that same year, Zepto raised another $100 million, before raising another $200 million in May 2022. Its penultimate funding round valued the company at $900 million.
Zepto’s revenue from operations increased 14-fold to Rs 2,024 crore in financial year 2022-23 (FY23) compared to Rs 140.7 crore in the previous year. Meanwhile, the Mumbai-based startup’s losses widened three-fold to Rs 1,272 crore for the period, as against Rs 390.3 crore a year ago, according to filings with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs.
The firm’s total expenses for the year came in at Rs 3,350 crore, a six-fold increase from Rs 532.7 crore in FY22. In total, Zepto spent around Rs 1.7 to earn a single rupee during the year. This is down from roughly Rs 3.7 it spent last year for each rupee earned.
