The quick-commerce funding story is moving beyond consumer-facing platforms, with investors beginning to back the infrastructure that allows newer categories to offer rapid delivery without building their own networks from scratch.
The opportunity is emerging as quick commerce expands into specialised categories. Verticalised quick-commerce startups attracted about $150 million in 2025, nearly 20 times the $8 million raised in 2024, with more than 20 companies raising capital, according to Bain & Company.
But alongside brands and platforms, a second layer is taking shape — shared dark stores, warehousing, fulfilment technology and last-mile networks that can serve multiple businesses.
“Shared fulfilment and dark-store networks can improve capital efficiency by allowing specialised players to scale without building these capabilities from scratch,” Archana Jahagirdar, founder and managing partner, Rukam Capital, said.
The model is already attracting venture capital. In March, quick-commerce enablement startup Inamo raised $8 million in a Series A, led by Prime Venture Partners. It operates more than 80 dark stores across six cities and processes more than 1.8 million orders a month, with plans to cross 200 stores by 2026.
Its proposition is effectively a plug-and-play fulfilment layer, covering dark-store operations, technology, workforce and last-mile delivery.
For investors, such businesses offer exposure to the expansion of vertical quick commerce without requiring a bet on which individual category will emerge as the winner.
“The infrastructure layer of vertical quick commerce primarily is a second-order effect to the growth of quick commerce and the establishment of the quick-commerce commercial model,” Devi Prasad Biswal, co-founder, 1DigitalStack, an e-commerce technology company, said.
Unlike individual verticals, where investors have to pick categories and business models, infrastructure can balance the bets out, making it a relatively lower-risk and less-crowded opportunity, he said.
Plug-and-Play Networks
The immediate attraction is capital efficiency. Building a dedicated dark-store network requires enough order density for the economics to work. A BCG report estimates that a 500 sq ft dark store needs around 150-200 orders a day to reach operational profitability, while a 2,000 sq ft store requires around 700 orders.
For smaller vertical players, sharing infrastructure can, therefore, provide a cheaper way to enter a market, test demand and build density without committing significant capital upfront.
The opportunity is extending beyond consumer brands. Fairdeal.Market raised $15 million in May to expand its B2B quick-commerce network, enabling kirana stores in the Delhi-NCR to replenish more than 1,000 SKUs within 60 minutes. It plans to expand its dark stores, technology and last-mile network and reach more than 100,000 retailers.
Healthcare is producing another version of the model. DocPharma raised $2 million in August to build 100 compliant dark stores and strengthen a technology platform integrating warehouse management, inventory intelligence, order management and fulfilment for e-pharmacies, hospitals, insurers and other healthcare platforms.
Commoditisation Risks
The bigger question, however, is whether these infrastructure companies can retain pricing power as more players enter the market.
“Basic warehousing, delivery and standard fulfilment will increasingly become commoditised,” Jahagirdar said. The stronger moats, she added, will come from category-specific capabilities, inventory and demand intelligence, and specialised infrastructure such as cold chains.
Biswal said last-mile fleets, optimisation and warehouse management have already become largely commoditised. More defensible opportunities could lie in demand monetisation and complex workflows involving cold chains and products with expiry constraints.
That creates a difficult trade-off for infrastructure-as-a-service companies. They solve a clear problem for emerging verticals, but the very businesses that eventually succeed may have little reason to remain dependent on them.
“Eventually most players who succeed will need to build infrastructure of their own based on demand circles,” Biswal said. He expects the infrastructure-as-a-service model to remain a relatively modest-margin business, with Ebitda margins potentially capped at around 10-15%.
The risk is visible in the consumer-facing market itself. Fashion player Zilo raised $15.3 million in its Series A, while baby-care startup Ozi raised $6.2 million. Premium grocery player FirstClub has raised another $55 million, taking its total funding to $86 million.