Indian fast commerce startup Zepto stated it has raised $400 million in a funding spherical led by a brand new investor, California Public Workers’ Retirement System (CalPERS), a U.S.-based pension fund. The spherical, which is a mixture of major and secondary funding, additionally has participation from present traders, together with Avenir, Avra, Lightspeed, Glade Brook, The Stepstone Group, and Nexus Enterprise Companions. After this funding, the corporate plans to go public subsequent 12 months.

Zepto competes with different fast commerce gamers reminiscent of Everlasting’s (previously Zomato) BlinkIt, Swiggy Instamart, and Tata-owned BigBasket — all a part of publicly listed corporations. The startup has been on a funding spree because it picked up $1.3 billion in a span of a number of months final 12 months. Since Zepto’s final funding spherical in November 2024, Swiggy made its public debut on India’s inventory change, and Blinkit surpassed Zomato in gross order worth (the entire worth of buyer orders) for Q1 2025.

The corporate additionally faces competitors from legacy ecommerce gamers reminiscent of Flipkart and Amazon, which have began their very own fast commerce supply companies.

Startups are additionally verticalized e-commerce choices. Accel-backed Swish and Zing are working within the meals supply house; publicly listed Nykaa, Flipkart-owned Myntra, Silkk, and Blip wish to ship attire to prospects in an hour; Lightspeed-backed Snabbit is permitting customers to e-book house companies like cleansing inside 10 minutes; and startups like FirstClub are taking a curation strategy to grocery supply.

Zepto and CEO Aadit Palicha are assured concerning the startup’s progress. Palicha stated that the corporate has scaled from 500,000 day by day orders 5 quarters in the past to 1.7 million day by day orders and predicted that the expansion will proceed.

“The important thing metric for this spherical of funding was our capacity to show darkish shops worthwhile whereas buying over 10 million new month-to-month transcating customers. We clearly invested incrementally in buyer acquisition and retailer launches. However at the same time as you had been doing that, we had been in a position to hold turning shops worthwhile,” Palicha instructed TechCrunch.

BlinkIt, Instamart, and Zepto function in lots of of those areas, with meals supply being probably the most notable one. Nonetheless, Zepto needed to pause its Zepto Cafe providing in 44 cities as a consequence of employees challenges.

Indicators for the short commerce market are encouraging in India. Morgan Stanley predicts the short commerce market might attain $42 billion by 2030. Bernstein stated in a be aware in March that it might attain $100 billion in a decade. The analyst agency additionally famous that in goal markets fast commerce is the first approach persons are shopping for groceries now.

Zepto has largely focused on main cities in India by way of increasing companies. J.P. Morgan famous earlier this month that BlinkIt has its darkish retailer community of warehouses to satisfy on-line orders in additional than 204 cities, in comparison with Swiggy Instamart in over 104, and Zepto in over 80 cities in India.

The funding is a notable one for CalPERS. The pension fund usually invests in enterprise capital by way of middleman funds reasonably than main direct investments in startups. CalPERS has been aggressively increasing its enterprise publicity since 2022 after what officers known as a “misplaced decade” of underperformance, scaling its enterprise allocation from round $800 million to a focused $5 billion. The fund’s resolution to guide a spherical in an Indian quick-commerce startup seemingly alerts sturdy institutional confidence in India’s speedy supply sector and maybe CalPERS’ rising urge for food for direct enterprise investments in rising markets, too. Notably, CalPERS can also be an investor in funds of Zepto’s present backers, like Lightspeed and Common Catalyst.