Startup Deep Dive : Zomato — Blinkit overtakes food delivery

In the three months to March 2026, Indians spent more buying groceries through Blinkit than they spent ordering food through Zomato. Blinkit’s net order value reached ₹14,386 crore for the quarter; the food delivery business that gave the company its name did ₹9,757 crore, as per Eternal’s Q4 FY26 results. The company that taught India to order dinner on an app is now, by that measure, a grocery company that also delivers dinner.

That inversion is the story of Eternal (Zomato), the company that was listed under the Zomato name until 20 March 2025. It is worth about ₹3.1 lakh crore on the market (roughly $32 billion; $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026), it turned its first full-year profit only in FY24, and in January 2026 its founder handed the chief executive’s job not to a food delivery lieutenant but to the head of Blinkit. This is how a restaurant search engine became a holding company whose most valuable limb is ten-minute grocery.

Quick facts

What Eternal actually is

Eternal is a holding company for four consumer-internet businesses. Zomato takes orders from restaurants and delivers them. Blinkit runs the quick-commerce operation that delivers groceries and everyday goods from small neighbourhood warehouses, usually in ten to twenty minutes. Hyperpure is the unglamorous business-to-business arm that sells vegetables, meat, packaging and kitchen supplies to restaurants. District, spun out in 2024, is the going-out app for booking movies, events and dining.

The customers, then, are not one group but three: the diners and shoppers who use the apps, the restaurants and brands that pay to be found and stocked, and the kitchens that buy their raw materials from Hyperpure. The company sells convenience to the first, visibility and logistics to the second, and wholesale supply to the third. The rename in March 2025 was a way of saying out loud that the listed entity is no longer a food delivery firm with side projects. It is a portfolio, and for the past year the portfolio has been led from the grocery side.

The insight: information, not price

Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah were analysts at Bain & Company in Delhi, both engineers from IIT Delhi, when they noticed colleagues queuing to photocopy restaurant menus at lunch. In 2008 they scanned the menus and put them online. The site was called Foodiebay, and it became the largest restaurant directory in the Delhi-NCR region within roughly nine months, as per the company’s own account of its early history.

The insight was not that food could be delivered cheaply. It was that the barrier to eating out, and later to ordering in, was information: what a place served, what it cost, whether it was any good. Solve discovery first, the founders reasoned, and the transaction would follow. The service was renamed Zomato on 18 January 2010 to be shorter and easier to remember. Delivery, the business most people now associate with the brand, came years later, once the directory had the diners and the restaurants already on the platform.

The struggle years

The decade after the rename was not a smooth climb. In 2015 Zomato bought the American restaurant-discovery firm Urbanspoon and pushed hard into the United States and other foreign markets. The expansion did not work. In October 2015 the company laid off about 300 people, close to 10% of its global staff at the time, and shut most of its US offices, including its former headquarters in Seattle, as per contemporaneous reporting by TechCrunch. The cuts fell hardest on the “content” teams who physically visited restaurants to collect menus and photographs — the very activity the company had been built on. The stated reason was blunt: the model was not scalable and the business was not profitable.

The retrenchment continued for years. In September 2019 Zomato let go of about 600 employees, more than 10% of its workforce, citing redundancies created by automation, as per Business Standard. Through this period the company was losing money heavily, and its survival depended on repeated infusions of venture capital rather than on the business paying for itself. The image of Zomato as an inevitable winner is a retrofit; for much of its life it was a loss-making directory searching for a business model that could stand on its own.

The turning point: buying Blinkit at a discount

The single decision that reset the trajectory was the acquisition of Blinkit. On 24 June 2022 Zomato’s board approved buying the quick-commerce firm, then recovering from a cash crunch, in an all-stock deal worth ₹4,447 crore (about $568 million), with Blinkit shareholders receiving one Zomato share for every ten they held, as per Business Standard and Entrackr. The price marked roughly a 43% cut to the $1 billion valuation Blinkit had commanded at its previous round — Zomato was buying a distressed asset in a segment most investors then considered a cash furnace.

Look at the numbers on either side of that decision. When it was bought, Blinkit was a loss-making grocery startup few wanted to own. By FY25 its net order value had reached ₹22,371 crore, up from ₹10,503 crore the year before, as per Eternal’s FY25 disclosures. By the quarter to March 2026 Blinkit’s net order value of ₹14,386 crore had overtaken food delivery’s ₹9,757 crore, and Blinkit posted its first positive adjusted EBITDA of ₹37 crore, or 0.3% of net order value. The acquisition that looked opportunistic in 2022 is the reason the group renamed itself, and the reason its founder later handed the top job to Blinkit’s chief executive.

The money behind it

Zomato’s cap table was built over a decade of venture money. The first institutional cheque came from Info Edge, the Naukri.com parent, which put in ₹4.7 crore in July 2010 and kept investing across several tranches — the backing that gave a two-founder directory its early credibility and runway. Later rounds brought in Sequoia Capital from 2013 and, in February 2018, a $200 million investment from Ant Financial that pushed Zomato past a $1.1 billion valuation, as per Tracxn and press reporting. A 2021 pre-IPO round of about $250 million, led by Tiger Global, valued the company near $5.4 billion. In total the company raised over $1 billion from private investors before going public.

The public milestone came in July 2021. Zomato’s initial public offering ran from 14 to 16 July and listed on 23 July 2021, raising ₹9,375 crore — ₹9,000 crore of fresh capital and a small offer for sale. Priced at ₹76 a share, the stock closed its first day at ₹126, up 66%, valuing the company at roughly $12 billion, and the issue drew bids worth about ₹2.1 lakh crore, as per Business Standard and CNBC. It was the largest Indian IPO of that year to date and the first of the new internet cohort to test the public market. Today the listed entity is worth about ₹3.1 lakh crore, as of 18 September 2026.

How Eternal makes money

Money reaches Eternal in four different shapes. In food delivery, restaurants pay a commission on each order, plus fees for advertising and for the delivery itself, and customers pay a platform fee; the cost that eats into this is the payout to delivery riders and the discounts funded to keep orders flowing. In quick commerce, Blinkit historically earned a marketplace commission, but from the first quarter of FY26 it shifted most of its business to an inventory-led, first-party model — it now buys the goods and sells them, so its reported revenue includes the full value of what shoppers pay, not just a commission. Advertising by brands wanting shelf space in the app is the higher-margin layer on top.

Hyperpure makes money the oldest way of all: buying supplies wholesale and selling them to restaurants at a markup, a thin-margin distribution business. District earns commissions on tickets and bookings. The part people get wrong is the shape of the margin. Food delivery, the mature business, is where the profit sits — it produced ₹1,505 crore of adjusted EBITDA in FY25. Quick commerce, the business the market prizes, was still losing money at that point, and the first-party switch means a growing share of Eternal’s revenue is now low-margin retail turnover rather than high-margin platform fees.

The numbers

Three years of consolidated figures show a business that grew into profit and then poured that profit back into growth. Revenue and results are for the years ended 31 March, from company filings reported by MediaNama, Business Standard and YourStory.

Two things need reading carefully. FY24 was the first year the company made a full-year net profit — ₹351 crore, after a ₹971 crore loss the year before. And the FY26 revenue figure, up 169%, is not what it looks like: most of the jump is Blinkit’s switch to a first-party model, which grosses the full price of goods into revenue rather than only a commission. The mechanical effect inflates the top line without a matching rise in profit — indeed net profit fell in FY26, to ₹366 crore from ₹527 crore, because the company kept spending to build out quick commerce. The healthier signal is the fourth quarter: net profit of ₹174 crore, up 346% year on year, as Blinkit’s losses narrowed and then turned.

Where the money actually comes from

Ask most people what Zomato earns its money from and they will say food delivery. The FY25 split of adjusted revenue tells a more crowded story: food delivery ₹9,418 crore, Hyperpure ₹6,196 crore, Blinkit ₹5,206 crore, and District ₹737 crore, as per Eternal’s FY25 segment disclosures. The surprise is Hyperpure — the boring business of trucking vegetables to kitchens earned more adjusted revenue in FY25 than Blinkit did.

The deeper surprise is the split between where the money comes from and where the value is. Food delivery is the profit engine; quick commerce is the growth engine and the reason for the valuation. That is why the March 2026 quarter matters: Blinkit’s net order value of ₹14,386 crore pulled ahead of food delivery’s ₹9,757 crore, with District at ₹2,736 crore and Hyperpure revenue at ₹978 crore. The business the company was named after is now the smaller of its two consumer engines by the measure the company itself leads with.

The risks

The first risk is the quick-commerce war Eternal has chosen to win. Blinkit holds an estimated 46% of the Indian quick-commerce market with 2,243 dark stores, ahead of Swiggy Instamart’s roughly 24% and Zepto’s roughly 22%, as per Datum Intelligence data. But the rivals are spending to catch up: Zepto reported FY26 losses of about ₹5,905 crore, and per-order losses across the sector remain steep. Holding the lead means continuing to open stores and fund discounts, which is why a company with ₹54,364 crore of FY26 revenue made only ₹366 crore of profit. The margin, when it comes, is wafer-thin — Blinkit’s best quarter so far cleared adjusted EBITDA of just 0.3% of net order value.

The second risk is that the profitable business is not the one being valued. If quick-commerce economics do not durably improve, the market’s ₹3.1 lakh crore price rests on a segment that has only just stopped losing money, while the food delivery arm that actually earns is growing more slowly. The third is a governance and key-person shift: in January 2026 founder Deepinder Goyal stepped down as group chief executive, handing the role to Blinkit’s Albinder Dhindsa and moving to vice chairman to pursue “higher-risk exploration”. A founder-led company betting its identity on quick commerce has, in effect, put the quick-commerce leader in charge — a logical move that also concentrates the company’s future on the least proven, most competitive part of the portfolio. Regulatory pressure on gig-worker conditions and food safety sits underneath all of it.

The takeaway

The transferable lesson is that the business that makes the money and the business that makes the valuation are rarely the same, and the gap between them is where a company’s real strategy hides. Eternal lists as a profitable food delivery firm and is priced as a quick-commerce bet. Its cleanest source of profit is the mature arm it is happy to grow slowly; its identity, its rename and its chief executive now come from the arm that only just stopped bleeding. When you value any company, separate the engine that pays the bills from the engine the market is buying — because management will follow the second one, even when the first one is what works.

Frequently asked questions

Is Eternal the same company as Zomato?

Yes. Eternal Limited is the listed parent company that was called Zomato Limited until the rename took effect on 20 March 2025. The Zomato app keeps its name; only the holding company changed.

Why did Zomato change its name to Eternal?

To reflect that the listed entity is no longer only a food delivery firm. It is a holding company for Zomato, Blinkit, Hyperpure and District, and the new name lets it be read as a portfolio rather than a single product.

Is Blinkit bigger than Zomato now?

By net order value in the quarter to March 2026, yes. Blinkit did ₹14,386 crore against food delivery’s ₹9,757 crore. Food delivery, however, was still the more profitable of the two in FY25.

Is Eternal profitable?

Yes, at the group level. It reported net profit of ₹366 crore in FY26 and ₹527 crore in FY25, after its first full-year profit of ₹351 crore in FY24. Margins remain thin because of continued investment in quick commerce.

Who is the CEO of Eternal?

Albinder Dhindsa, previously CEO of Blinkit, became group chief executive in January 2026. Co-founder Deepinder Goyal is now vice chairman.

Sources

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

• Eternal Limited — FY25 annual report and segment figures, via MediaNama, July 2025
• Eternal Limited — FY26 (year ended March 2026) results, via Indian Startup News and YourStory, April 2026
• Business Standard — Eternal Q4 FY25 and Q4 FY26 results; Zomato FY23–FY24 results
• Business Standard / Entrackr — Zomato–Blinkit acquisition terms, June 2022
• Business Standard / CNBC — Zomato IPO details and listing, July 2021
• Tracxn and Business Standard — funding history, Info Edge, Ant Financial, Tiger Global
• TechCrunch — 2015 layoffs and US office closures, October 2015
• Business Standard — 2019 layoffs, September 2019
• Business Standard — Zomato to Eternal rename, March 2025
• TechCrunch — Deepinder Goyal steps down as CEO; Albinder Dhindsa appointed, January 2026
• Business Standard / Inc42 — Aditya Mangla appointed food delivery CEO, July 2025
• Datum Intelligence, via industry reporting — quick-commerce market share and dark-store counts, 2026
• Business Standard / stock exchanges — Eternal market capitalisation, September 2026
• Trading Economics — USD/INR exchange rate, 18 September 2026

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