Startup Deep Dive : Thrive — the 3% commission food app that Coca-Cola backed and still shut down in 2025

Thrive charged restaurants a commission of about 3% per order — roughly a tenth of the 15% to 30% that Zomato and Swiggy levy — listed more than 20,000 restaurants at its peak, and pulled in equity cheques from two of the biggest names in Indian food and beverage: Jubilant FoodWorks, the company that runs Domino’s in India, and Coca-Cola India. In June 2025, five years after it launched, Thrive shut down anyway.

That is the contradiction at the centre of this story. A platform with a structurally cheaper model, marquee strategic backers, and a valuation that had climbed to a reported ₹104.68 crore pre-money (Coca-Cola round, April 2023) still could not build a business that stood on its own next to the Zomato-Swiggy duopoly. Co-founder Dhruv Dewan put it plainly on the way out: competing “profitably in a space dominated by the duopoly of Zomato and Swiggy proved immensely challenging.” This is a deep dive into what Thrive was, who built it, how it made (a little) money, and why cheaper was not enough.

Quick facts

What Thrive did

Thrive was a restaurant discovery and direct-ordering platform for Indian diners, built on the argument that restaurants should own their customers rather than rent them from an aggregator. On the consumer side (the app and thrive.zone), users could find restaurants, read and post recommendations, and order for delivery, pickup or pre-order. On the merchant side, Thrive sold software: an order-management dashboard with WhatsApp and POS integrations, order tracking and delivery-partner assignment, plus marketing tools to run Facebook and Instagram campaigns. The pitch to restaurants was blunt and quantified:

• Commission of about 3% per order, versus 15% to 30% typically charged by Zomato and Swiggy (YourStory, May 2023).
• Direct access to customer identity and data — which the large aggregators withhold from restaurants.
• Part of the wider “#OrderDirect” movement alongside rivals such as DotPe (which undercut even Thrive at about 1% commission) and Waayu.

The origin

Thrive did not start as a food-ordering app. Its parent, Hashtag Loyalty, was incorporated on 14 May 2016 and spent its first years as a customer-engagement and loyalty SaaS business — helping restaurants and retailers capture customer data, run loyalty programmes and market to repeat diners. The founding team of Dhruv Dewan, Karan Chechani and Krishi Fagwani therefore came at food delivery from an unusual angle: not logistics, but the customer relationship. They had already spent years watching restaurants pour money into Zomato and Swiggy while learning almost nothing about the people eating their food.

The founding insight for Thrive, launched in 2020, followed from that vantage point. If a restaurant’s biggest complaint about aggregators was high commissions and zero customer ownership, then a platform that flipped both — a low take rate plus first-party customer data — should be able to peel merchants away. Thrive layered a consumer discovery app on top of the existing SaaS stack, so a diner’s order flowed to the restaurant directly and the restaurant kept the relationship. The timing, in the first pandemic year, put the whole industry on notice about how dependent it had become on two intermediaries.

The struggle years

The problem Thrive chose was also the reason it struggled: it was attacking a duopoly with enormous capital, brand recall and rider networks. A cheaper commission is easy to advertise and hard to convert into demand, because diners open the app with the biggest selection and the fastest delivery, not the one that is kindest to restaurants. Thrive’s difficulties were concrete:

• Demand generation. Restaurants would list on Thrive but keep taking most orders through Zomato and Swiggy, where the customers already were. Dewan openly accepted the leakage, saying the aim was discovery even “if a consumer discovers a restaurant on Thrive and ends up ordering on another platform” (YourStory, 2023).
• Logistics dependence. Without an owned rider fleet at national scale, direct ordering leaned on the restaurant’s own delivery or third-party partners, which made experience uneven versus the aggregators’ dense networks.
• Thin economics. A ~3% take rate means the platform books very little revenue per order, so it must run at large volume to cover technology, sales and support — a hard ask against incumbents willing to subsidise.
• A crowded #OrderDirect field. DotPe (at roughly 1% commission) and Waayu were selling the same “cut out the aggregator” story to the same restaurants, compressing whatever pricing edge Thrive had.

None of these were solved by being cheaper. They were the reasons cheaper was not enough.

The turning point

The single event that reframed Thrive was Jubilant FoodWorks buying in. Jubilant — the master franchisee for Domino’s Pizza, Dunkin’ and Popeyes in India — took a reported stake of about 35% in Hashtag Loyalty valued at ₹24.75 crore, reported in 2021. That deal did two things at once. It validated the direct-ordering thesis with the endorsement of the country’s largest quick-service operator, and it implied a company worth roughly ₹70 crore post-money — closely matching the independently reported valuation of about $9.43 million in October 2021 (Clay/YourStory data). Before the round, Thrive was a promising low-revenue challenger with a good story; after it, Thrive was a funded, strategically backed platform with a path to national scale and a marquee logo behind its pitch to other restaurants. The catch: a strategic investor’s endorsement buys credibility, not consumer demand — and demand was the thing Thrive could not manufacture.

The money behind it

Thrive’s capital story is short but unusually strategic — two of India’s largest F&B names rather than a long list of venture funds:

• Jubilant FoodWorks — reported ~35% stake in Hashtag Loyalty valued at ₹24.75 crore (reported 2021); implied post-money roughly ₹70 crore, consistent with an independently reported ~$9.43 million valuation in October 2021.
• Coca-Cola India — acquired a 15% minority stake, agreement dated 17 April 2023, at a reported pre-money valuation of ₹104.68 crore (Business Standard; Outlook Business). It was described in coverage as Coca-Cola India’s investment into an Indian food-ordering platform.
• Earlier backers — the Thrive vertical also listed early investors including Whiteboard Capital in its seed/Series A stage (Tracxn).

Converting the peak marker: ₹104.68 crore is about $10.9 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 (18 September 2026, Trading Economics). The valuation roughly climbed from ~₹70 crore (2021) to a ₹104.68 crore pre-money marker (2023) — real appreciation, but modest in absolute terms and far below the war chests of the incumbents it was fighting.

How it made money

Thrive earned in two ways, and the gap between them explains a lot:

• Ordering commission — about 3% per transaction (plus a payment-gateway charge), versus 15% to 30% at Zomato and Swiggy. This is the headline pitch but a thin revenue line per order.
• Restaurant SaaS — subscription-style software for order management (WhatsApp/POS integration, order tracking, delivery assignment) and marketing (social-media advertising). Higher margin per account, but sold into an industry accustomed to paying nothing upfront.

The part people get wrong: because commission is only ~3%, the platform’s booked revenue is a small fraction of the order value flowing through it. A restaurant might route lakhs of rupees of orders through Thrive while Thrive books only a few thousand rupees of commission. That structure keeps the aggregators honest for restaurants, but it forces the challenger to reach massive order volume before its own economics work — the classic bind of a low-take-rate marketplace.

The numbers

Reported financials are for the operating entity, Hashtag Loyalty Private Limited, and are small — a reminder that a 3% take rate books little revenue even on meaningful order volume. Figures are Tracxn/MCA-derived; the standalone entity’s bottom line cannot be cleanly split into the Thrive ordering vertical, so profit/loss is shown as not separately disclosed rather than asserted.

Revenue grew from ₹0.29 crore in FY22 to ₹0.67 crore in FY24 (Tracxn), a reported one-year CAGR of about 52% into FY24 — real growth, but off a tiny base. The company reported 39 employees as of 31 December 2024 (Tracxn). The founders’ own exit statement — that competing profitably against the duopoly “proved immensely challenging” — is the clearest public signal on the bottom line, and the reason the numbers above never got the chance to compound into a durable business.

Where the money came from

Two splits matter for Thrive: the revenue mix and the geographic footprint. Both point to the same surprise — the reach looked national while the money stayed small.

• Revenue mix. Two lines — thin ordering commission (~3%) and higher-margin restaurant SaaS (order management + marketing). The SaaS layer, inherited from Hashtag Loyalty’s loyalty/CRM roots, was the more defensible margin, but ordering was the growth engine and the volume story.
• Geography (by period, company-stated). Coverage claims widened over time and should be read as merchant counts, not simultaneous active-order figures:
  • 2023: about 3,000 restaurants, concentrated in Mumbai (YourStory).
  • April 2023: over 12,000 restaurants across India, per the Coca-Cola announcement.
  • August 2024: over 20,000 restaurants listed when Thrive joined the ONDC Network (07 August 2024).
  • At shutdown (June 2025): over 7,000 restaurants, 1 million-plus orders fulfilled, across 100-plus cities (afaqs).
• The surprise. Despite 20,000-plus listed restaurants and a nationwide footprint, the operating entity booked well under ₹1 crore of revenue in FY24. The breadth was real; the monetisation, at a 3% take rate without owned demand, never scaled with it.

Thrive also joined the government-backed ONDC Network in August 2024, betting that a shared, open demand layer could substitute for the customer base it could not build alone. CEO Krishi Fagwani framed it as “solving demand generation for these restaurants” through a decentralised network — an implicit admission that demand, not price, was the binding constraint.

The risks

• Demand-side gravity (the fatal one). In food delivery, consumers concentrate where selection and speed are greatest. A cheaper commission is a supply-side benefit that does not, by itself, move diners. Thrive listed tens of thousands of restaurants but could not pull enough order volume through its own funnel to make a 3% take rate pay — the mechanism the founders cited when they wound down in June 2025.
• Thin unit economics against subsidised incumbents. At ~3% commission, revenue per order is small, so the model needs very high volume to cover fixed technology, sales and support costs. Zomato and Swiggy, far better capitalised, could keep spending on discounts and logistics, stretching the volume Thrive needed further out of reach.
• Strategic-investor dependence and channel conflict. Backing from Jubilant FoodWorks and Coca-Cola brought credibility and capital, but strategic money often carries narrower objectives than pure growth capital, and independent restaurants may hesitate to route data and orders through a platform part-owned by a giant QSR operator. Concentrated strategic ownership is not the same as deep, patient war-chest funding.

The takeaway

Thrive’s story is a clean lesson in where the moat sits in a marketplace. The team correctly diagnosed the restaurant’s pain — high commissions, no customer ownership — and built the cheaper, fairer supply-side product the industry said it wanted. Marquee investors agreed. But in a two-sided market, the scarce asset is demand, not supply, and demand pools with whoever already has the diners’ attention. Being ten times cheaper for restaurants did not make a single consumer choose Thrive over the app with the widest selection and the fastest rider. The transferable point: when you enter a market held by an entrenched network, solving the unhappy side (here, merchants) is necessary but not sufficient — you still have to give the powerful side (here, diners) a concrete reason to switch. Thrive never found that reason, and in June 2025 it closed, with Dhruv Dewan moving to Tata Digital.

Frequently asked questions

Is Thrive the same company as DotPe?

No. Thrive is the consumer brand operated by Hashtag Loyalty Private Limited, founded by Dhruv Dewan, Karan Chechani and Krishi Fagwani. DotPe is a separate Gurugram-based company (founded by former PayU executives) that competed in the same “#OrderDirect” space, offering restaurants an even lower commission of about 1%. The two are often mentioned together because they pushed the same anti-aggregator model.

How much commission did Thrive charge restaurants?

About 3% per order, plus a payment-gateway charge, compared with the 15% to 30% typically taken by Zomato and Swiggy (YourStory, May 2023). Rival DotPe charged roughly 1%.

Who invested in Thrive?

Its two headline backers were Jubilant FoodWorks (the Domino’s India operator), which took a reported ~35% stake valued at ₹24.75 crore (reported 2021), and Coca-Cola India, which bought a 15% stake in April 2023 at a reported ₹104.68 crore pre-money valuation. Earlier backers included Whiteboard Capital.

Why did Thrive shut down?

It ceased operations in June 2025, about five years after launch. Co-founder Dhruv Dewan said competing profitably against the Zomato-Swiggy duopoly “proved immensely challenging.” A low commission attracted restaurants but did not generate enough consumer demand to make the model sustainable.

How big did Thrive get?

Company-stated figures varied by period: about 3,000 restaurants in Mumbai in 2023, over 12,000 nationally by April 2023, over 20,000 listed when it joined ONDC in August 2024, and at shutdown over 7,000 restaurants with more than 1 million orders fulfilled across 100-plus cities. Despite that reach, the operating entity booked under ₹1 crore of revenue in FY24.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• afaqs — “Thrive calls it a day after 5 years; Dhruv Dewan moves to Tata Digital” (June 2025).
• Business Standard — “Coca-Cola India acquires a minority 15% stake in Hashtag Loyalty” (April 2023).
• Outlook Business — “Coca-Cola Acquires 15% Stake In Hashtag Loyalty” (April 2023).
• YourStory — “Can Thrive and Waayu’s SaaS play beat Swiggy-Zomato” (May 2023).
• YourStory — “Coca-Cola India buys 15% stake in food ordering startup Thrive” (April 2023).
• The Ken — “DotPe, Thrive, and the #OrderDirect movement hoping to eat Zomato-Swiggy’s lunch” (2023).
• Indian Startup News / CXOToday — “Mumbai-based foodtech brand Thrive joins the ONDC Network” (August 2024).
• Tracxn — Hashtag Loyalty Private Limited company and legal-entity profiles, financials and shareholding (2026).
• Inc42 — Hashtag Loyalty company/funding profile (2026).
• Trading Economics — USD/INR reference rate (September 2026).

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