With competition heating up in India’s quick commerce space, Zepto co-founder Aadit Palicha has alleged that the chief financial officer of a rival company has been attempting to orchestrate a smear campaign to discredit the startup. In a LinkedIn post, he said that the rival CFO has been calling Zepto’s investors to make wild allegations with no empirical evidence, circulating false data through sources known to journalists, and paying bots on social media to spread a negative narrative.
Without naming the company, he said, “Candidly, this episode is below the stature expected of the CFO of a high-quality company, and makes it obvious that they are starting to get nervous about how fast Zepto’s EBITDA is improving.”
In the same post, Aadit Palicha outlined some business metrics of Zepto:
He claimed that Zepto has grown from approximately 750 crore of GOV per month in May 2024 to 2,400 crore of GOV per month in May 2025. He clarified that Zepto’s definition of GOV has fruits and vegetables at selling price and includes ad revenue.
Aadit Palicha also said that Zepto’ EBITDA has improved by 20 absolute percentage points (2,000 basis points) from January 2025 to May 2025, and is approaching single-digit territory. “Our cash burn is down approximately 65 per cent over that same period,” he added.
At the same time, he added that even as Zepto’s EBITDA improved sharply from January 2025 to May 2025, the company has still grown roughly 20 per cent in GOV in that period. That represents an average 4 per cent to 5 per cent month-on-month growth.
He further added, “We expect to have the vast majority of our dark stores fully EBITDA positive (including backend supply chain costs, customer support, last mile and all fixed/variable dark store costs) by next quarter. We also expect our overall company EBITDA and Operating Cash Flow to be within a few hundred basis points of breakeven in this same period.”
As of the beginning of this quarter, Zepto has approximately Rs 7,445 crore of net cash in the bank (fully reconciled to bank statements) and with the company’s current cash burn trajectory, Aadit Palicha said, “we have many years of runway”.
Zepto maintained that it is not planning any large-scale store rationalisation and is, in fact, accelerating store launches.
“My hope is this CFO in question stops this activity. I’m okay with healthy/aggressive competitive talk, but lies are not acceptable. Frankly, these calls from you are only making it clearer to the investor community that we are a strong competitor. It’s best for all of us to simply focus on execution,” Palicha concluded.
Earlier in March, there were talks around Zepto securing a $250 million secondary round as part of its strategy to increase Indian investor ownership ahead of its plans for an initial public offering (IPO) later this year. The quick commerce startup is expected to launch its IPO later this year or in early 2026. Currently, Indian shareholders own 33 per cent stake in the company and Zepto is aiming to increase the stake of domestic investors to nearly 50 per cent ahead of the IPO.
Zepto competes with Swiggy’s Instamart and Eternal’s Blinkit. Other players like Flipkart and Amazon are also ramping up their quick commerce offerings.