Zepto’s founders have done incredibly well for themselves — they’re worth nearly half a billion dollars each at the age of 22 — but even early investors in the company have made bank.
Zepto had been one of the pioneers of the quick commerce space in India, and its early backers seem to be reaping the rewards of identifying the trend before it was mainstream. Aditya Jhaveri, Founder and CEO of Blox, has revealed the potential windfall early investors in Zeptoo have enjoyed. In a recent interview, Jhaveri, himself an early investor in Zepto, provided insight into the staggering returns those who believed in the company’s vision from the outset are now seeing. His account also offers a glimpse into Zepto’s early days, when the company operated under a different name and business model.
“I’m an investor in the company Zepto,” Jhaveri said in an interview. “I’m actually in the first cohort of investors before institutional investors came on, when it was called Kiranacart. It actually had a different business model at that time, and then they pivoted to Q-Commerce. And I’ve been an investor throughout,” he added.
Jhaveri said that he’d remained an investor all these years, and hadn’t sold a single share. The interviewer asked him if he’d made 50x returns on his initial investment. “No boss, I mean, I think we are off by an order of magnitude,” he replied. “So the Y-Combinator round happened at 7 million dollars, and today [it is] a five billion dollar company, so we’re talking about like 400, 500, 600x based on when people got in.” Zepto was founded only in 2021, so early investors seem to have made a 700x return in just four years.
Now it’s hard to make 700x returns in four years through traditional investments, but such hypergrowth startups can offer such opportunities if investors can get in early enough. Flipkart’s first angel investor had turned a Rs. 10 lakh investment into the company to Rs. 130 crore when the company had been acquired by Walmart. But such successes are few and far between — as many as 90 percent of startups fail without giving any sort of a return to their investors. But finding the ones that do — and investing in them early — can generate life-changing wealth for investors.