Zepto's biggest moat? Building its own tech stack
For Zepto, the real challenge wasn’t launching 10-minute delivery, it was making it predictable and profitable. CTO Nikhil Mittal says the answer lies in building the company’s own tech stack from scratch
For quick commerce major Zepto, executing a 10-minute delivery was the easier part, according to Zepto CTO Nikhil Mittal.
“The harder part has been figuring out how to do it predictably—how to ensure every order reaches in 10 minutes, regardless of traffic situations, or festivals, etc. And do that at scale, sustainably and cost-efficiently,” said Mittal, in a panel discussion at TechSparks 2025. The session was also attended by Zepto co-founder Kaivalya Vohra and moderated by Shradha Sharma, Founder and CEO of YourStory.
One of the most important decisions Zepto took early on was to build its entire tech stack and not rely on third-party systems.
“If we really wanted to win this space, especially knowing that other grocery players would eventually follow suit, and we knew if we really had to win this battle, we had to curate and build our own custom technology,” explained Mittal. “That’s the only way you can control speed, precision, and cost.”
However, the journey to owning its tech stack wasn't linear. A funny but defining incident reinforced that decision early on, recalls Vohra.
The turning point
In July 2021, Zepto had just launched and was initially relying on a mix of third-party systems. By December of that year, right after announcing its $100-million Series C funding round, a disaster struck.
“We had the whole town hall with the team, and the press articles were going live… and just a few hours later, our UK-based warehouse management system completely went down. At that time, across the country, we had around 60–70 stores, and suddenly, the app our packers used just stopped working. We would be doing 30,000-40,000 orders per day, but it broke down around Christmas time. So all of us were panicking. No one from the vendor was available for two weeks,” Vohra recalled.
That night, the entire team stayed up till late, building a backup system from scratch.
“By morning, we were in stores training people and installing the new app,” Vohra recalled. “And at that point, we realised it’s important to own software and the entire stack in-house. Because this can’t ever happen again.”
Building its own warehouse management system would later become one of Zepto’s biggest moats—complete end-to-end control of its tech stack.
Edited by Kanishk Singh