Aadit Palicha, co-founder and CEO of the fast-delivery startup Zepto, has blamed the chief financial officer (CFO) of a rival company for plotting against his firm in recent days.
On LinkedIn, Palicha called the campaign one that entailed "calling our investors to make outrageous claims on us with no empirical data, distributing fake numbers/Excel sheets on Zepto via sources familiar with journalists, and hiring social media bots to propagate a smear campaign."
He did not reveal the name of the competitor company. Zepto's competitors in the instant commerce space are Blinkit (owned by Eternal, previously a Zomato unit), Swiggy Instamart, Flipkart Minutes, and Tata BigBasket, among others.
"Honestly, this incident is beneath the stature of a CFO of a high-quality firm, and makes it clear that they are beginning to get anxious regarding how rapidly Zepto's EBITDA is increasing," Palicha said.
He underlined Zepto's expansion, saying the company's gross order value (GOV) has jumped from approximately ₹750 crore per month in May 2024 to ₹2,400 crore per month in May 2025.
"Our working capital definition of GOV includes Fruits and Vegetable at selling price and Ad Revenue. Our EBITDA has come down by 20 absolute percentage points (2,000 basis points) between January 2025 and May 2025 and is moving into single-digit space. Our cash burn has decreased by around 65 percent over this period," said Zepto's CEO.
Palicha also said that the company anticipates having most of its dark stores fully EBITDA positive in the next quarter, including backend supply chain expenses, customer service, last-mile delivery, and all variable and fixed dark store costs.
At the beginning of this quarter, we have approximately ₹7,445 crore of net cash in bank (fully reconciled to bank statements). With our current cash burn, we have several years of runway," he added.
Finishing on a strong note, Palicha called upon the CFO in question to stop the negative campaign. "I welcome healthy and aggressive competition, but lies are unacceptable. Frankly, these calls from you only serve to make it more obvious to the investor community that we are a robust competitor. It's best for all of us to just focus on execution," he concluded.
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