DEEPINDER GOYAL is a founder who has seen every phase of a business cycle and decided that the sensible thing is to treat each problem as precisely as you treat a leaky pipe: find the leak, patch it, stop the damage, repeat. In fact, Goyal’s public story is often told in soundbites — the man who delivers food himself, the founder who stays at a lush green five-acre farmhouse in Delhi’s Dera Mandi area with a fleet of gleaming machines — Porsche, Aston Martin, Lamborghini, and Bentley — in the driveway. The private story, as he relays, is quieter and more arithmetic: no grand vision, just “one step after the other”.

At his farmhouse, about an hour’s drive from Central Delhi, Goyal comes across as a man of few words. Humble. Direct. The cars are background noise; the person is not. “I didn’t even start this to build a company or a unicorn,” he says, smiling. “When I started Zomato in 2008, the idea was to list restaurant menus, and make some ad money, maybe a couple of lakhs a month. I didn’t want to do a job.”

Back then, he was a young consultant at Bain & Company, restless with the idea of doing someone else’s work for long hours. But slowly, Zomato, which began as a side project, became a phenomenon. “I actually started this to work less, but ended up working more,” he says. What began as a simple directory morphed into India’s largest food delivery platform — and from there, a consumer tech group spanning food, quick commerce, dining out, ticketing, and supply chains.

For someone who’s spent nearly two decades at the helm of a company that’s become shorthand for India’s food economy, Goyal doesn’t think in the language of grand visions or long-term targets. “I don’t have any goals like how large I want the company to get,” he says. “It’s just about living in the reality right now.”

The approach has defined Zomato’s evolution — and survival. The shift from restaurant listings to food delivery in 2015, Goyal recalls, wasn’t strategic foresight, but a necessity. “Food delivery happened because we thought our listings business would be under threat if we didn’t do it. It wasn’t a matter of choice or vision. It was pretty much, we have to do it, or we’ll have to shut down.”

He wasn’t wrong. “Now there are no listing businesses left,” he points out. “So we could see that for survival, we had to do this.”

Even Blinkit — India’s largest quick-commerce player — began as a defensive move. “If a new quick-commerce player emerges, they’ll have a large fleet,” he explains. “It’s super easy for that company to get into food delivery. But building quick commerce is harder if you’re a food delivery player. So we said, we have to do quick commerce. Otherwise, what we have is going to be toast.” He pauses. “Once you do something, you have to do it well. So that’s it. No grand plans.”

Today Zomato sits under Eternal, the parent company that also houses Blinkit, ‘going-out’ app District, and B2B restaurant supply arm Hyperpure. In FY25, Eternal’s net sales surged to ₹20,243 crore, a three-year CAGR of 69%, according to Capitaline data. It reported a PAT of ₹527 crore, after posting losses in the previous fiscals.

The scale of the machine is staggering. In Q1FY26, the combined net order value (NOV) of Eternal’s B2C businesses grew 55% YoY to ₹20,183 crore, the first quarter where quick commerce overtook food delivery. On an annualised basis, Eternal’s B2C businesses now hover around $10 billion in NOV; quick commerce accounts for nearly half of it.

Its B2B arm, Hyperpure, grew 89% YoY that quarter. The company expects a temporary slowdown ahead, but Goyal doesn’t fuss over quarterly fluctuations. “We only chase good growth, something that’s not powered by subsidies — something that will stay even if you remove the discounts. That’s what we do.”

For him, profitability isn’t a trade-off. “Growth versus profit is not a question that happens in our head,” he says. “We only chase good growth. Profitability is a separate optimisation metric.”

That clarity shows up in the numbers. Eternal’s consolidated adjusted revenue rose 67% YoY to ₹7,563 crore in Q1FY26, while adjusted Ebitda slipped 42% YoY to ₹172 crore, largely due to continued investments in Blinkit and District — two verticals Goyal says are “long bets that must be done well”.