Zepto’s updated draft red herring prospectus shows a quick-commerce business still working through a basic question: how to make speed cheaper.
Its average delivery cost per order rose from ₹42.05 in 2023-24 to ₹45.80 in 2024-25, and then to ₹45.74 in 2025-26.
The filing, according to experts, does not show a company that has solved the quick-commerce economics, but rather one that is still spending heavily to build reach, density and speed.
Zepto’s disclosures show why: active delivery partners rose from 49,278.25 in FY24 to 118,919.25 in FY25 and 221,667.17 in FY26, while dark stores increased from 337 to 1,029 and then 1,139 over the same period. The company aggressively scaled its network, but this has not yet led to a meaningful decline in delivery costs per order.
Active delivery partners are the number of unique transacting riders who have successfully been assigned at least one order in a month, averaged across the months.
On the brighter side, the loss per order, which surged to ₹136.1 in FY25 from ₹84.6 in FY24, narrowed to ₹78.8 in FY26 as total orders climbed from 132.87 million to 332.11 million, then to 640.18 million. In the quarter ended March 2026, it improved further to ₹59.4 per order.
The lower per-order loss appears to be linked to better utilization of its dark stores. The filing shows that orders per dark store per day rose from 1,325 in FY24 to 1,565 in FY25 and 1,677 in FY26. That works out to about 1.16 orders per minute per store in FY26, indicating that each dark store was handling about 1.2 orders per minute every day.
This, according to experts, basically means that Zepto has improved fulfilment efficiency at the dark-store level. “Zepto has definitely cracked the efficiency piece,” Devendra Agrawal, founder and chief executive of Dexter Capital.
Satish Meena, analyst at market research firm Datum Intelligence, agreed that lower losses per order suggest Zepto is getting better at monetizing transactions and utilizing its network. “The supply chain is becoming more efficient, but the company is still some distance away from demonstrating sustainable profitability at scale.”
Learning the ropes
However, Peshwa Acharya, founder of Think as Consumer, a consulting firm for e-commerce and consumer brands, said the numbers show a business that is still expanding but has not yet achieved the operating leverage investors would want to see.
“The moment you grow a business, you increase customer centricity, which often entails that costs go up. Quick commerce remains a retail predicament, and compared with manufacturing, scale does not automatically translate into lower unit costs,” he said.
He added that the more relevant question is not just how many orders Zepto is processing, but what kind of orders they are and which customer cohorts they come from.
“You have to look at actual bill value (basket), cohort-wise, and its profitability,” he said. “Low-value baskets leave little room to absorb delivery and infrastructure costs, while higher-value baskets are more likely to support the model.”
Zepto’s UDRHP does not disclose average order value, but instead uses net receivables value, or NRV, which it defines as the total monetary value of orders sold on its platform, after net discounts, plus user fees, subscription income and advertisement income, including taxes. In FY26, NRV was ₹24,815.54 crore, and orders were 640.18 million, implying an NRV per order of about ₹387.7. That figure has remained broadly unchanged over the past three years.
On profitability, Acharya said the improvement in loss per order is encouraging, but should not be mistaken for a lower-cost delivery engine. “Delivery cost per order and loss per order are two different numbers,” he said. “A company can improve one while the other remains sticky.”
Loss per order is a broader profitability measure, while delivery cost per order captures only the cost of fulfilling an order. That means the two can move in different directions, with delivery remaining expensive even as the overall business becomes less loss-making.
He added that this distinction matters because quick commerce will ultimately be judged not just on growth, but on whether it can turn speed into a sustainably profitable model.
Building block
What makes Zepto’s disclosures notable, though, is their transparency. The filing lays out delivery costs, rider additions, dark-store growth and lease expenses in a way that offers a far clearer view of unit economics than is usually available from quick-commerce rivals. That makes the document useful not just as a Zepto story, but as one of the first public windows into how the model functions at scale.
The filing also shows how much of quick commerce’s economics remain tied to physical infrastructure and last-mile execution. Zepto’s lease expense, which covers the cost of renting and operating dark stores, rose from ₹82 crore in FY24 to ₹229.2 crore in FY25 and ₹491.7 crore in FY26, making it an important margin variable even though it still accounts for only about 2% of revenue.
Lease expense is a fixed or semi-fixed cost. It tends to rise when a company adds more stores, enters new markets or expands coverage density. In the IPO filing, Zepto has set aside ₹1,734.9 crore from the fresh issue for lease rentals for existing dark stores and ₹1,628.9 crore for setting up new dark stores, underlining how central its network footprint is to the capital plan.
Fresh proceeds are also earmarked for dark-store expansion, technology, cloud infrastructure and marketing, suggesting that the company is not moving away from fixed infrastructure but doubling down on it. Read alongside the fulfilment footprint, that commitment becomes clearer: Zepto’s count of active dark stores rose from 337 in FY24 to 1,139 in FY26. The number of leased dark stores also rose to 1,172 in FY26 from 322 in FY24.
According to the filing, lease payments for dark stores are set to remain elevated over the next few years, with aggregate lease payments of about ₹407.24 crore in FY27, ₹569.56 crore in FY28 and ₹603.89 crore in FY29, before easing to ₹154.25 crore in FY30 for the shorter period shown.
Zepto’s top line has risen sharply over the same period, but losses have widened too. Revenue from operations more than doubled from ₹4,454.52 crore in FY24 to ₹11,109.95 crore in FY25 and ₹22,623.58 crore in FY26. Net loss widened from ₹1,248.64 crore in FY24 to ₹3,367.30 crore in FY25 and ₹5,904.95 crore in FY26, showing that faster growth has not yet translated into profitability.