Zomato and Swiggy had settled into a comfortable duopoly in the food delivery space, but a serious new contender might be emerging.
Rapido’s food delivery arm Ownly is now processing roughly 50,000 orders a day in Bengaluru, according to a Moneycontrol report, a number that puts it at close to 10% of the city’s overall food delivery market. For a product that only launched citywide in February and was doing about 5,000 orders a day as recently as March, the jump is steep enough that restaurant owners, investors and the incumbents themselves have all started paying attention.
The report cites restaurant chain operators telling Moneycontrol that both Zomato and Swiggy have grown noticeably more accommodating in recent weeks, dangling better commercial terms to keep partners from drifting toward Ownly. That is an interesting shift for a market where restaurants have spent years complaining about commissions and had little leverage to do anything about it.
The zero-commission bet
Ownly’s core pitch has stayed consistent since it began quiet testing in Koramangala, HSR Layout and BTM Layout last year: no commission on restaurant orders, no listing fees, no visibility fees. Restaurants pay nothing to be on the platform, and Ownly instead earns through a flat delivery fee charged to customers, currently around ₹30 plus GST. The app has gone as far as trolling Swiggy and Zomato’s fee structures directly on its checkout screen, crossing out platform and packaging fees with lines like “we’re not those guys.”
Because restaurants aren’t clawing back a 20-30% commission by inflating menu prices, Ownly has claimed that prices on its app run close to what customers would pay walking into the restaurant, often cited at around 15% below what shows up on Swiggy or Zomato for the same order. Roughly 20,000 restaurants have signed on so far, built on Rapido’s relationship with the National Restaurant Association of India, which represents over 500,000 eateries nationally and has had its own long-running disputes with the two incumbents over commissions running as high as 35-40% once discounts and advertising are factored in.
The timing has worked in Ownly’s favour. More than a thousand restaurant owners in Bengaluru, organised under the Bruhat Bengaluru Hotels Association, threatened to delist from Swiggy and Zomato entirely from August 15 unless the platforms addressed commission and discounting practices in writing. A Competition Commission of India probe has separately found that Zomato and Swiggy engaged in anti-competitive practices, including preferential treatment for certain restaurant partners, adding regulatory pressure on top of the commercial one.
Rapido isn’t going to have the field to itself for long either. Flipkart has announced its own entry into food delivery, also starting in Bengaluru and also expected to undercut on commissions by leaning on the ONDC network. Zomato and Swiggy shares fell on the news, an early sign of how seriously the market is treating the prospect of a genuine third and fourth player.
Can the model actually hold up
The open question is whether a flat delivery fee alone can sustain a food delivery business at scale, something Swiggy and Zomato have spent close to a decade and enormous capital figuring out through commissions, ads and cross-subsidies from quick commerce. Ownly is leaning heavily on Rapido’s existing fleet of two-wheeler “Captains,” using idle capacity from the ride-hailing business to keep delivery costs down rather than building a dedicated logistics network from scratch, which is the same playbook Rapido used to undercut Ola and Uber on pricing.
Rapido has also structured Ownly as a separate subsidiary, Ctrlx Technologies. The company raised its most recent round at a valuation of roughly $3 billion earlier this year, giving it some room to burn cash while it figures out unit economics on the food side.
At 10% of one city’s market, Ownly is still tiny next to Swiggy and Zomato’s combined national footprint. But food delivery in India has a history of markets tipping quickly once a credible low-cost alternative gets restaurant buy-in, and Bengaluru’s restaurant community has made it fairly clear it’s looking for one. Whether Ownly can replicate the Bengaluru numbers in a second or third city, without Rapido’s ride-hailing base to lean on for delivery capacity, is the test that will actually decide if this is a dent in the duopoly or just a Bengaluru story.