Zepto CEO Aadit Palicha alleges ‘smear campaign’ by rival’s CFO

Zepto co-founder and chief executive officer Aadit Palicha has accused the chief financial officer of a rival quick commerce firm of “trying to build a smear campaign against Zepto”.

“Over the past few days, the CFO of one of our competitors has been trying to build a smear campaign against Zepto. This includes calling our investors to make wild allegations about us with no empirical evidence, giving out false numbers/Excel sheets on Zepto through sources known to journalists, and paying bots on social media to spread a negative narrative,” Palicha said in a post on LinkedIn, without naming the company or the person.

Palicha said, “This episode is below the stature expected of the CFO of a high-quality company, and makes it obvious that they are starting to get nervous about how fast Zepto's EBITDA is improving.”

“Nevertheless, I want to respond to each of these pointers upfront in case any media stories or social media posts go out this week with inaccurate information,” he added.

Zepto has grown from approximately ₹750 crore of gross order value (GOV) per month in May 2024 to ₹2,400 crore of GOV per month in May 2025, Palicha said, adding that the company’s definition of GOV has fruits and vegetables at selling price and includes ad revenue.

“Our EBITDA has improved by 20 absolute percentage points (2,000 basis points) from January 2025 to May 2025, and is approaching single-digit territory. Our cash burn is down approximately 65% over that same period,” he claimed.

“At the same time, even as our EBITDA improved sharply from January 2025 to May 2025, we have still grown roughly 20% in GOV in that period. That represents an average 4% to 5% month-on-month growth,” Palicha explained.

Palicha expects to have the vast majority of Zepto dark stores to be fully EBITDA positive, including backend supply chain costs, customer support, last mile and all fixed and variable dark store costs by the next quarter. “We also expect our overall company EBITDA and Operating Cash Flow to be within a few hundred basis points of breakeven in this same period,” Palicha said.

“As of the beginning of this quarter, we have approximately ₹7,445 crore of Net Cash in the bank (fully reconciled to bank statements). With our current cash burn trajectory, we have many years of runway,” said Palicha, adding that Zepto is not planning a large-scale rationalisation of stores. “On the contrary, we are ramping up store launches.”

“We have an excellent finance and controllership team with best-in-class H2H payment practices, vendor reconciliations, asset verification activities, internal audit systems and a rigorous Big 4 statutory audit record and Financial Due Diligence record with no material qualifications or variations,” he said.

“My hope is this CFO in question stops this activity. I'm okay with healthy/aggressive competitive talk, but lies are not acceptable. Frankly, these calls from you are only making it clearer to the investor community that we are a strong competitor. It's best for all of us to simply focus on execution,” said Palicha.