Aadit Palicha

CEO & Co-Founder, Zepto

Zepto CEO Aadit Palicha on AI, IPO Plans & 10-Minute Deliveries at India AI Summit

📅 Feb 20, 2026 moneycontrol 9 MIN 7417 VIEWS 35 SEGMENTS · 2 SPEAKERS

Zepto Founder & CEO Aadit Palicha showcases a live dark store at the India AI Impact Summit, reveals how AI is cutting coding costs exponentially, and shares insights on quick commerce competition and IPO readiness. #zepto #aaditpalicha #aisummit #aisummit2026 #indiaaiimpactsummit2026 Moneycontrol is India’s leading financial portal, offering market news, expert analysis, and powerful tools. A part of Network18, moneycontrol.com is India’s most trusted destination for financial and business news. #live #livenews #latestnews #topnews #moneycontrol #moneycontrollive #businessnews #business...

Questions asked in this interview

0:22So Aadit, how did you come up with this?
0:38But how did this work out for you?
1:19Right, so let's just go through this delivery hub. There are what, three aisles?
1:26Three aisles, and how many SKUs would that be?
1:53700 orders in a day in this small space, selling what product?
2:16How many delivery partners do you have stationed inside?
3:04Is it, you know, that quick food delivery is not that viable anymore?
3:40Does it still continue to be a core business for you?
4:28What's the current landscape looking like?
5:56Will you need to do a pre-IPO funding round?
6:11When are the approvals coming through?
7:16Is it making your engineers more efficient?

Interviewer 0:00 ↗

We're in conversation with Aadit Palicha, the founder and CEO of Zepto, right outside the Zepto dark store at the India AI Impact Summit here at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi. Aadit, thanks for talking to us. Pleasant surprise spotting you in Delhi and not Bangalore as usual.

Aadit Palicha 0:18 ↗

Yeah, just for the day, but if you want, we can walk through while we're talking.

Interviewer 0:22 ↗

So this is the Zepto delivery hub, essentially, where you order something inside Bharat Mandapam and it's delivered in 10 to 3 minutes. A couple of my colleagues used it, by the way, and it does work. So Aadit, how did you come up with this?

Aadit Palicha 0:34 ↗

No, no, no. Endorsement. Don't get me into trouble.

Interviewer 0:38 ↗

But how did this work out for you? And it's interesting that you're doing this in, you know, Blinkit's backyard, NCR.

Aadit Palicha 0:46 ↗

No, look, it has nothing to do with competition, etc. We just thought this would be a good opportunity to showcase Indian innovation at the AI summit on a global stage. We implement AI across our supply chain. Whether it's self-learning forecasting models, our advertising business, query contextualization, the bidding engine, campaign management, we actually do pretty deep implementation of AI. We think we're a real-world use case of AI in the application layer. So the point of view is how do we showcase innovative companies in India on the global stage, and this was a unique way of doing it. That was the point of view.

Interviewer 1:19 ↗

Right, so let's just go through this delivery hub. There are what, three aisles?

Aadit Palicha 1:24 ↗

Yeah, three aisles. It's 1,400 square feet.

Interviewer 1:26 ↗

Three aisles, and how many SKUs would that be?

Aadit Palicha 1:28 ↗

This is about, I think, 1,500 if I'm not wrong, SKUs.

Interviewer 1:31 ↗

So there are about 1,500 SKUs, products. Everything from noodles to nuts to whatever you need to keep yourselves hydrated in Bharat Mandapam. And you have a Zepto Cafe here.

Aadit Palicha 1:43 ↗

Yes.

Interviewer 1:44 ↗

So everything in 10 minutes, something to snack on in between. And give me some numbers.

Aadit Palicha 1:49 ↗

Sure. Just yesterday, this cafe did over 700 orders in a day.

Interviewer 1:53 ↗

700 orders in a day in this small space, selling what product?

Aadit Palicha 1:56 ↗

Actually, I'll have to check, but I'm guessing samosas, usually.

Interviewer 1:59 ↗

Samosas, puffs.

18 more exchanges in this transcript

Cite this transcript

APA, MLA, BibTeX

APA

Palicha, A. (2026, February 20). Zepto CEO Aadit Palicha on AI, IPO Plans & 10-Minute Deliveries at India AI Summit [Interview transcript]. moneycontrol. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/715273/

MLA

Aadit Palicha. "Zepto CEO Aadit Palicha on AI, IPO Plans & 10-Minute Deliveries at India AI Summit." moneycontrol, 20 Feb. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/715273/.

BibTeX

@misc{palicha2026_715273,
  author       = {Aadit Palicha},
  title        = {Zepto CEO Aadit Palicha on AI, IPO Plans \& 10-Minute Deliveries at India AI Summit},
  howpublished = {Interview transcript, moneycontrol. CEOInterviews.AI},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {feb},
  url          = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/715273/},
  note         = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}

▶

Key Quotes (2)

“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.”

▶ 6:09 POLICY

“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.”

▶ 7:51 CONTROVERSIAL POLICY

More interviews with Aadit Palicha

Why Zepto's Aadit Palicha Turned Down Stanford to Deliver GroceriesMay 19, 2026 · Y Combinator · 28 min
Zepto Nears $7B Valuation: CEO Aadit Palicha On Path To Profitability & IPO Plans! | Business NewsOct 16, 2025 · ET Now · 17 min

All Aadit Palicha transcripts →

About Aadit Palicha

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

All Aadit Palicha appearances → moneycontrol on YouTube →