Prime Highlights

• Zepto CEO Aadit Palicha defended consumer internet startups following Union Minister Piyush Goyal’s scathing comments criticizing their attention towards low-tech businesses such as grocery delivery.
• Palicha demonstrated Zepto’s contribution to employment generation, tax payments, and FDI influx and referred to it as a strong case of Indian innovation.

Key Facts

• Zepto has generated almost 1.5 lakh jobs within 3.5 years.
• It pays ₹1,000+ crore worth of taxes each year and has attracted more than $1 billion in FDI.
• Considerable investments have been made in fresh produce backend supply chains.

Key Background

Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal recently created a controversy by asking Indian startups to look beyond areas such as grocery delivery and ice cream making, and focus instead on high-tech sectors like semiconductors, robotics, and artificial intelligence. While delivering a speech, he asked whether the future of Indian entrepreneurs is to be “delivery boys and girls” or not, implying that this path is too shallow like in other tech ecosystems worldwide.

In reply, Aadit Palicha, Co-founder and CEO at Zepto, responded to Goyal’s remarks publicly through a LinkedIn post. He took on the criticism but offered a lengthy defense of consumer internet businesses like Zepto. In Palicha’s view, Zepto has, in less than four years, created about 1.5 lakh jobs in India, paid over ₹1,000 crore in tax every year, drawn in over $1 billion in foreign direct investment, and invested heavily in optimizing India’s grocery and agriculture supply chains.

Palicha insisted that relegating consumer internet startups underplays the tech backbone that they serve to build. He quoted the examples of Amazon, Alibaba, and Tencent—the latter two traditionally considered consumer internet players—which grew up to spearhead advancements in cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and data infrastructure. Palicha said India has the capability to construct mass-market tech innovation and must begin with developing its consumer internet ecosystem.

He invited the Indian government, investors, and the startup ecosystem to be supportive of homegrown champions instead of diluting their success. Palicha reasserted Zepto’s goal to become a world-class internet company and guaranteed that future capital raised would be reinvested in long-term innovation in India.

He ended by visualizing a more vibrant Indian economy and capital market, drawing inspiration from the American example, emphasizing that with proper support and implementation, India has both the talent and resources to spearhead global tech revolutions.