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Aadit Palicha

CEO & Co-Founder, Zepto

Search every verified Aadit Palicha interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Aadit Palicha, co-founder and CEO of Zepto, spoke at Y Combinator's Startup School India about the company's origins and his approach to building the business. Palicha said that he and co-founder Kaivalya Vohra began working on the idea when they were 17, initially delivering groceries to neighbors in Mumbai via a WhatsApp group during the COVID-19 pandemic. He stated that they took a year off from college and reached a revenue run rate of 60-70 crore rupees before committing to the opportunity, and that they saw early signs of product-market fit after 8-10 months. Palicha described his philosophy of starting from "the most extreme positive customer experience" and working backwards, and said that "customer delight is where financial value starts." Palicha also discussed operational and strategic priorities for Zepto, which now employs over 200,000 people and operates a network of dark stores to support a 10-minute delivery model. He noted that the company has reduced software and managed services spending to near zero, cutting "huge amounts of costs." He attributed his own learning to surrounding himself with people "smarter than you" and asking "shamelessly" basic questions. Palicha stated that Zepto's goal is to "build an urban grocery platform" and "urban grocery infrastructure for the country," with the ambition of creating "India's homegrown version of Amazon

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Notable quotes

“We've cut almost all our software spends to zero. We've cut, you know, a lot of our managed services spends. We've been able to reduce a lot of inefficiencies and manual tasks in the system, right? That were happening with people. We've been able to automate it now. And so my overall organization, if you walk into the Zeppto office, there's so many more tools that are automated and there's no outsource tools at all. ”

“At the end of the day, I think it's impossible to build a financially viable, profitable business without customer delight. Customer delight is where financial value starts. Starts with the customer.”

“We got to maybe a very early sign of PMF I think 8 months into the journey and that's when we started saying okay there's retention there's compounding in the business and only up until we got to the point where we started doing about 10,000 orders per day I remember that point but that's when we said okay this is a real business and this is a once in a lifetime opportunity and we should go for it, right? So we I thi”

“We've automated accounts payable — we process thousands of invoices with our own software and have saved a lot of costs, which inevitably reduced headcount. On engineering, we're heavy users of models like Cursor and Claude Opus and are tracking cost per line of code written, which is coming down exponentially so with similar headcount we can do much more.”

“We've filed — we're in the process of getting our IPO done; the process has been excellent so far. We pride ourselves on excellent corporate governance and controls; we're one of the youngest companies in the country to close a Big Four statutory audit cleanly, with a strong independent board and audit chair.”

“We're close to a billion dollars of net cash in bank now and we're very well capitalized. We are moving towards an IPO pretty soon. Now that this financing is closed, that was the main thing that we wanted to get done first, we should pretty rapidly be making strides there.”

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