Startup Deep Dive : Magicpin – how a rewards app became India’s third-largest food delivery player on ONDC

Magicpin does not own a single kitchen, a delivery fleet it built from scratch, or a household-name food app, yet by October 2024 it was clearing about 150,000 food and logistics orders a day and calling itself the largest food-delivery seller app on ONDC. In the year to March 2024 its revenue from operations tripled to roughly ₹870 crore (about $91 million), a 2.92x jump that pulled it into the conversation as India’s third-largest food-delivery app by order volume, per Business Standard.

The contradiction sits in plain sight: the company that now challenges Zomato and Swiggy on food delivery counts Zomato as one of its largest shareholders, and it grew not by outspending the duopoly but by riding a government-backed open network. Magicpin started life as a cashback-and-rewards app for offline shops. This is the story of how a voucher business, built by two ex-Bain consultants, turned a public rail called ONDC into a food-delivery engine.

Quick facts

What Magicpin does

Magicpin runs a hyperlocal platform that connects shoppers and diners to offline stores and restaurants, and increasingly fulfils orders for them. Its core loop began as discovery-plus-rewards: users find local merchants, buy discounted vouchers, and earn cashback for shopping in person. Since 2023 the same merchant base and consumer app have been turned into a food-delivery and logistics operation running largely on ONDC, India’s open commerce network.

• Reaches a merchant base described as 275,000-plus stores across India (Wikipedia, company-stated).
• Sells discounted vouchers redeemable at partner restaurants, retail and fashion outlets.
• Fulfils food delivery as a seller app on ONDC, taking orders that originate on buyer apps such as Paytm and others.
• Runs a fashion and retail vertical that reached about ₹1,000 crore in gross merchandise value (company-stated $120 million) in FY25.
• Operates MagicFleet, a delivery-logistics network launched in 2024, and rolled out a 15-minute food-delivery format in December 2024.

The origin

Magicpin was founded in 2015 by Anshoo Sharma and Brij Bhushan. Sharma had spent about six years at Lightspeed India, where he was among the earliest members of the India team and was involved in nine investments; before that, both founders were colleagues at Bain & Company. The founding insight was blunt: the overwhelming majority of Indian retail spending still happened offline, in neighbourhood shops and restaurants, yet almost none of it was measurable, and small merchants had no cheap way to pull in nearby customers the way online marketplaces could.

The early product answered that gap. Shoppers uploaded a bill or checked in at a local store and earned points and cashback; merchants got footfall they could attribute, and Magicpin sat in the middle as the discovery layer for offline commerce. It was, in effect, a loyalty and rewards engine for the physical high street rather than a marketplace that held inventory. That asset-light stance, owning the demand relationship without owning stock or stores, is the thread that runs through every later pivot.

The struggle years

Rewards businesses are easy to start and hard to make profitable, and Magicpin’s early filings show the strain. Growth came, but it was bought with marketing, and losses widened faster than revenue in the years around the pandemic.

• FY21 revenue from operations was ₹146 crore against a net loss of ₹43.75 crore (Inc42, from filings).
• FY22 revenue rose 59.6% to ₹233 crore, but net loss ballooned 3.3x to ₹144.96 crore (Inc42/Entrackr).
• The loss blow-out was driven by marketing: advertising and promotional spend jumped 7.3x to ₹80.72 crore in FY22 from ₹11.12 crore in FY21 (Inc42).
• The business was heavily concentrated in vouchers, which made up about 90% of operating income in FY22 (₹209 crore), leaving it exposed to a single revenue line.

The company had also cycled through positioning, from a check-in rewards app to a cashback and savings platform, without a delivery business of its own to defend margins. Going into FY23, Magicpin was a mid-sized rewards player spending heavily to grow a voucher business, with no obvious path to the scale of the food-delivery majors it sat next to.

The turning point

The turn came from an outside rail. Magicpin joined ONDC, the government-backed Open Network for Digital Commerce, in March 2023 with about 22,000 restaurant partners, and chose to act as a seller app fulfilling orders that originated on other companies’ buyer apps. The scale-up that followed was steep and documented by CEO Anshoo Sharma.

• Early May 2023: about 100 orders a day on ONDC.
• Four weeks later: about 10,000 orders a day.
• By October 2024: about 150,000 (1.5 lakh) food and logistics orders a day, a roughly 15x jump over 15 months (Outlook Business, Business Standard).
• Restaurant partners grew from about 22,000 at joining to about 70,000 fifteen months later.
• Sharma stated double-digit market share in major cities, with more than 10% share in food delivery in markets like Delhi and Bengaluru.

That volume made Magicpin the largest food-delivery seller app on ONDC and, on Business Standard’s reading of FY24, India’s third-largest food-delivery app by order volume behind Zomato and Swiggy, a position it reached without building the two-sided app the incumbents spent a decade and billions of dollars on.

The money behind it

Magicpin’s cap table is unusual because its most strategic backer is also a competitor in food delivery. The funding shape, over roughly a decade:

• Total raised: about $106 million across its life, per Tracxn; Inc42 counts about $104.88 million across nine rounds.
• Lightspeed Venture Partners has been the most consistent backer, investing from the early rounds through Series D; it made Series A investments in 2015 and 2018.
• WaterBridge Ventures participated in the Series C round in 2018.
• Series D (November 2021): about $60 million, led by Zomato, which put in roughly $50 million for about a 16% stake; existing investors including Lightspeed also participated (Business Standard, Entrackr).
• Reported valuation after Series D: just over $312 million (Business Standard).

The Zomato investment is the pivotal one. It gave Magicpin capital and a strategic anchor in food, even as Magicpin later built an ONDC delivery business that competes for the same restaurant orders. No fresh priced round has been widely reported since 2021, so the $312 million figure is the last confirmed valuation marker rather than a current one.

How it makes money

Magicpin’s economics are a voucher-and-commission model layered on an asset-light platform. The mechanics, and the part people get wrong:

• Voucher sales are the volume engine. Magicpin buys merchant vouchers at a discount and resells them to consumers; the gross value of vouchers flows through its books, which is why revenue can look large relative to the take. In FY24, voucher procurement was the single largest cost at ₹776 crore, about 80.7% of total expenditure (Entrackr).
• The margin is thin and sits in the spread and fees, not in the headline gross value, which is the common misreading. Entrackr pegged FY24 spending at about ₹1.10 for every rupee earned, with an EBITDA margin around -8.67%.
• Food delivery adds commission and logistics income. As a seller app on ONDC, Magicpin earns on the orders it fulfils and, via MagicFleet, on the delivery leg.
• Rewards and advertising from merchants who pay for visibility and footfall round out the mix.

The strategic logic of ONDC is cost, not just reach: by using shared public infrastructure for discovery and payments, Magicpin avoids the customer-acquisition and app-building spend that defined Zomato’s and Swiggy’s early years, and it charges restaurants lower commissions than the incumbents typically do.

The numbers

Four years of the P&L show a company that spent to grow, then began to fix unit economics as scale arrived. All figures are revenue from operations and net loss, in ₹ crore, from MCA filings via Inc42 and Entrackr.

• Revenue grew 2.92x in FY24 while the net loss shrank about 25% year on year (Entrackr), the first year the two lines moved in opposite, healthy directions.
• FY24 total income was about ₹880 crore and total expenditure about ₹961 crore (Entrackr).
• Advertising and promotion, the culprit behind the FY22 loss, was cut about 15% in FY24 even as revenue tripled (Entrackr).
• Cash and bank balance stood at about ₹50 crore at the end of FY24, with current assets of about ₹196 crore (Entrackr).

Where the money comes from

The revenue mix is shifting from a single voucher line toward a spread of hyperlocal businesses, and the split holds a surprise: the fashion vertical, not food, is where Magicpin quietly built a large gross-merchandise business.

• Vouchers remain the historic core, about 90% of operating income as recently as FY22 (Inc42).
• Fashion and retail: about ₹1,000 crore GMV in FY25 (company-stated $120 million), up about 20% year on year, spanning 16,000 outlets and 250-plus brands after adding about 6,000 stores (Outlook Business, Apparel Resources).
• Food delivery on ONDC is the fastest-growing volume line, at about 150,000 orders a day by late 2024, with more than 10% share in Delhi and Bengaluru (Business Standard, Outlook Business).
• Geography: double-digit food-delivery share is concentrated in top metros; the merchant network spans a claimed 275,000-plus stores nationally.

The surprise for anyone who files Magicpin under “food app”: its offline retail and fashion GMV is a comparably large story, and its food business is deliberately built on someone else’s network rather than a walled garden of its own.

The risks

• Dependence on ONDC. Magicpin’s fastest-growing line rides a public network whose rules, incentives and buyer-app traffic it does not control. Changes to ONDC subsidies, commission caps or buyer-app participation would hit order volume directly, because Magicpin sits on the seller side and depends on buyer apps for demand.
• A competitor on the cap table. Zomato holds roughly 16% from its 2021 investment while competing head-on in food delivery. That alignment can turn adversarial, and it complicates any future round, strategic exit or IPO where a rival is a large shareholder.
• Thin, gross-value-heavy economics. With voucher procurement at about 80.7% of FY24 expenditure and roughly ₹1.10 spent per rupee earned, the model has little margin cushion; a marketing war or discount escalation, the same dynamic that tripled losses in FY22, could quickly reverse the FY24 progress on losses.

The takeaway

Magicpin’s lesson is about leverage, not scale for its own sake. For most of its life it was a mid-sized rewards company that could not out-spend the food-delivery majors and did not try. When a piece of shared public infrastructure appeared, it recognised that the cheapest way to enter a duopoly market was to build on a rail everyone could use, and to compete on commission and cost rather than on customer-acquisition budgets. The transferable idea: when an incumbent’s moat is spend you cannot match, look for a structural shift, an open network, a regulatory opening, a platform, that lets you rent the moat instead of digging your own. Magicpin turned ONDC from a policy experiment into a working distribution channel faster than almost anyone, and it did so while keeping its asset-light shape intact.

Frequently asked questions

What is Magicpin and who owns it?

Magicpin is an Indian hyperlocal discovery, rewards and food-delivery platform run by Samast Technologies Private Limited, incorporated in 2015 and based in Gurugram. Its investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners, WaterBridge Ventures and Zomato, which holds roughly 16% from a 2021 investment.

Who founded Magicpin?

It was founded in 2015 by Anshoo Sharma, now co-founder and CEO, and Brij Bhushan, both former Bain & Company colleagues; Sharma had earlier spent about six years at Lightspeed India. Some records also list Naman Mawandia and Abhishek Awasthi as co-founders.

How does Magicpin make money?

Chiefly by buying merchant vouchers at a discount and reselling them to consumers, plus commissions and logistics income from food delivery on ONDC and advertising from merchants. In FY24, voucher procurement was its largest cost at about ₹776 crore, roughly 80.7% of total expenditure.

Is Magicpin really India’s third-largest food-delivery app?

By order volume on the reading of its FY24 numbers, Business Standard reported Magicpin as the third-largest food-delivery app, behind Zomato and Swiggy, and the largest food-delivery seller app on ONDC, with about 150,000 orders a day by late 2024.

What were Magicpin’s latest revenue and losses?

FY24 revenue from operations was about ₹870 crore, up 2.92x from ₹297 crore in FY23, with a net loss of about ₹78 crore, down about 25% year on year, per Entrackr; some trackers list a higher FY24 loss near ₹107 crore.

Sources

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

• Wikipedia, Magicpin company profile (2026)
• Inc42, Magicpin company, funding and financials profiles (2026)
• Inc42, “Savings Startup magicpin’s FY22 Loss Widens 3.3X To INR 145 Cr” (February 2023)
• Entrackr, “Magicpin triples revenue to Rs 870 Cr in FY24, cuts losses” (2025)
• Entrackr, “Zomato-backed Magicpin’s losses shot up over 3X in FY22” (February 2023)
• Entrackr, “Zomato invests $175 Mn cash in Magicpin, Curefit and Shiprocket” (November 2021)
• Business Standard, “magicpin largest food delivery app on ONDC, logs 150,000 orders daily” (October 2024)
• Business Standard, “magicpin revenue triples to Rs 870 cr in FY24, becomes 3rd largest food app” (February 2025)
• Business Standard, “magicpin raises $60 million in Series D round led by Zomato” (November 2021)
• Outlook Business, “Magicpin Records 15-Times Growth on ONDC, Receives 1.5 lakh Orders Per Day” (October 2024)
• Outlook Business / Apparel Resources, Magicpin fashion vertical FY25 GMV of Rs 1,000 crore (April 2025)
• Tracxn, Magicpin and Samast Technologies Private Limited profiles (2026)
• Lightspeed Venture Partners, Magicpin portfolio and founder background (2026)

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