It began as scanned restaurant menus, put online so office colleagues could stop arguing about lunch. Deepinder Goyal co-founded that in the late 2000s and it became Zomato — discovery, reviews and eventually delivery, across India and well beyond it.
Then smartphones arrived and the listings site became a delivery company. That is a far harder business — brutally competitive, cash-hungry, structurally hostile to margins. Zomato expanded anyway. Surviving the rivalry was the first job; finding the profitability public markets insist on was the second.
The idea was almost too simple: make it effortless to decide what to eat, then to have it arrive.
The 2021 listing was a landmark, among the first major Indian consumer-internet IPOs, and the share price became shorthand for how investors felt about the entire startup economy. Quick commerce and adjacent services followed.
Goyal kept experimenting and kept absorbing losses in pursuit of scale, for years. Zomato is now the case study people cite for both halves of that bargain — what building consumer internet in a price-sensitive market can achieve, and what it costs on the way.