Zepto makes haste slowly on the quick commerce route

The name Zepto is derived from the shortest unit of measurable time in Physics. But the creators of that name – two 20-year-old Stanford University dropouts – seem to be defying physics for the time being.

The quick commerce player, which started operations just two-and-a-half years ago after morphing from its previous avatars, is present across seven cities, operates around 240 dark stores, maintains over 6,690 stock keeping units and has doubled its daily delivery capacity to 350,000 orders in just over a year. The icing on the cake, of course, came last month when it raised $200 million at a valuation of $1.4 billion, thereby ending an 11-month unicorn drought in India.