BigBasket has appointed former Amazon India executive Amit Nanda as its chief executive officer (CEO), marking the first time an external executive will lead the Tata group-backed grocery-delivery platform after Hari Menon stepped down nearly 15 years after co-founding the company.
Nanda previously oversaw the e-commerce giant’s marketplace seller ecosystem. During his 11-year stint, he held leadership roles across product, technology, marketplace operations and private brands. Before Amazon, he worked at Hindustan Unilever and Citibank.
“Amit’s deep understanding of consumers, strong track record of building and scaling businesses, and extensive experience across e-commerce and consumer sectors make him uniquely positioned to lead BigBasket for its journey ahead,” Menon told Mint.
Menon’s exit comes after the platform publicly denied succession-planning reports nearly 10 months ago, when it said there were “no plans to hire a new CEO for BigBasket”.
Co-founders Hari Menon and Vipul Parekh will continue on the board and mentor the new leadership, the company said in a statement on Tuesday.
The appointment is the latest in a string of leadership changes at the Bengaluru-based company. In April, BigBasket named former Google Pay executive Arpit Jaiswal as chief growth officer to lead product, growth and customer acquisition initiatives.
In June, it elevated longtime executive Seshu Kumar Tirumala to chief operating officer. Tirumala, who has spent more than a decade at the company across sourcing, merchandising and private labels, is expected to strengthen the senior leadership team as BigBasket sharpens its focus on quick commerce.
Changing priorities
Menon told Mint that Tata Digital remains “completely aligned and committed” to BigBasket’s growth strategy, pushing back on noise about the parent company’s dissatisfaction with the company's financial losses and growth momentum in the highly competitive quick-commerce market.
“I don’t know what all this noise is about, but Tata Digital and the chairman are completely aligned with our strategy,” he said. Tata Digital, a 100% subsidiary of Tata Sons Pvt. Ltd, acquired BigBasket in 2021.
Menon wished BigBasket had acted faster and entered quick commerce much earlier, describing what he thinks he could have done differently during his 15-year stint as CEO.
“Initially, I was completely in denial of quick commerce. We all wondered who needed groceries in 10 minutes. But the market started moving, and customers began adopting, and we realized, we can’t not be in it. So in hindsight, maybe I should have done it faster.”
The company started with slotted deliveries, allowing customers to schedule groceries within fixed time slots. In 2022, it announced that its quick-commerce arm, BBNow, would be a priority as rivals such as Eternal’s Blinkit, Swiggy Instamart and Zepto gained market share.
Moreover, the company may have overstated the importance of slotted deliveries at the time, resulting in the loss of crucial time that could have been used to build BBNow faster, according to Menon.
“At the time, we thought that there would be customers for slotted deliveries and a set of customers for quick commerce because one caters to planned buys and the other to emergencies. So we maintained two separate doors. I probably needn’t have done that because a lot of new, younger customers came in through quick commerce.”
Having two separate offerings created “cognitive overload” on new customers who couldn’t decide which door to pick. “There, we lost out about four to six months. We should have gone straight to a single quick-commerce door,” Menon added.
Blinkit controls roughly 46% of the country’s quick-commerce market by gross merchandise value, followed by Swiggy Instamart at 27% and Zepto at 21%, while BigBasket’s BB Now accounts for just about 7%, according to industry estimates.
Quick-commerce battle
The sector is also entering a new phase of consolidation and capital-market scrutiny. Zepto, last valued at about $7 billion, filed draft papers for an initial public offering and is expected to seek a valuation of around $7-8 billion. It has rapidly expanded its dark-store network to over 1,200 stores, underscoring the scale race underway.
Meanwhile, e-commerce firms continue to expand. Flipkart Minutes plans to operate about 1,200 dark stores across 250 cities, while Amazon India is mounting an aggressive quick-commerce push through Amazon Now.
Unlike rivals that have prioritized aggressive expansion, BigBasket has focused on profitability. In a recent interview with Mint, Parekh said the company was willing to sacrifice market share to improve profitability, arguing that long-term sustainability mattered more than ranking among the sector’s largest players.
BigBasket reported revenue of ₹9,866.7 crore in 2024-25, down 1.9% from a year ago, while its net loss widened 41.8% to ₹2,006.8 crore.
Speaking of operating within a large structure such as the Tata group, Menon said BigBasket’s management has enjoyed “complete independence” so far. “Fortunately, we are allowed to run as an independent company. We were one of Tata’s early startup acquisitions. We’ve really not had too many issues.”
However, BigBasket’s slow speed may have been a rare concern, according to Menon. “Maybe in a very, very rare case, speed could have been an issue. But that’s not really something that’s bothered us.”