Deepinder Goyal

A workplace frustration seeded the venture. As a Bain & Company consultant in 2007, Deepinder Goyal noticed colleagues repeatedly lining up at a shared notice board to read printed restaurant menus before ordering lunch. He and fellow Bain analyst Pankaj Chaddah digitised those menus into a website called FoodieBay in 2008, sidestepping the engineering-hero narrative that surrounds most Indian startup origin stories.

Post the Blinkit acquisition Zomato has invested roughly 2,800 crore rupees into the quick-commerce unit, including a 500-crore infusion in January 2025. The continuing capital top-ups indicate that quick-commerce remained a cash-hungry vertical even after integration, requiring ongoing investment to defend share against Swiggy Instamart, Zepto and newer entrants.

Zomato raised 8,500 crore rupees through a Qualified Institutional Placement in November 2024, partially to fund the Blinkit investment. The QIP signalled a strategic decision to keep equity dilution as the funding lever for the quick-commerce war, rather than debt — a choice with implications for existing shareholders' long-term ownership.

The founders quit their consulting jobs in November 2009 to run FoodieBay full-time, then in November 2010 renamed it Zomato — partly because they were unsure they would stay only in food, and partly to avoid a trademark clash with eBay. The pivot to a more abstract brand marked the first of several identity refreshes that would culminate in the 2025 rebrand to Eternal Ltd.

Aggressive international expansion through 2012–2015 took Zomato into more than 20 countries, including the United States via the acquisition of Seattle-based Urbanspoon. The breadth-first push proved expensive; over 2022–2024 the company unwound most overseas markets, liquidating ten foreign subsidiaries inside a year — a tacit admission that global sprawl had underdelivered on unit economics.

Shareholders approved the special resolution renaming Zomato Ltd to Eternal Ltd in March 2025, formalising the holding-company structure that would house Zomato, Blinkit, Hyperpure and the District going-out vertical. The structural separation between parent brand and operating brands gave each vertical a cleaner capital-allocation identity.

Goyal pushed Zomato into food delivery in March 2015, originally leaning on third-party logistics like Delhivery and Runnr before acquiring Runnr in 2017 to bring a delivery fleet in-house. That infrastructural pivot — from a software marketplace into a hybrid tech-plus-logistics operator — set the unit-economics battle that Zomato would fight against Swiggy for the next decade.

Goyal publicly disclosed that he twice considered asking Blinkit founder Albinder Dhindsa to step aside post-acquisition, citing potential conflict-of-interest concerns. The admission — rare in Indian startup governance — illustrated the awkwardness of integrating a founder-CEO into a larger acquiring company, and informed Goyal's eventual decision to elevate Dhindsa to group CEO in 2026.

In January 2020 Zomato swallowed Uber Eats India in an all-stock deal worth roughly 206 million dollars, handing Uber a 9.99 percent stake. The trade absorbed a sub-5-percent rival and lifted Zomato's share of the Indian food-delivery market to roughly 52 percent — a textbook consolidation move just before COVID-19 lockdowns supercharged online ordering.

Blinkit is now Eternal's largest business vertical by order value, with revenue growth of 145 percent year-on-year reported for one recent period — a vindication of Goyal's 568-million-dollar all-stock bet. The performance reframed the 2022 acquisition from a contested move into a category-defining consolidation in Indian quick commerce.

Zomato's parent reported a net profit of 253 crore rupees in the relevant reporting period alongside Blinkit's revenue surge — a moment that crystallised the dual-engine thesis of food delivery plus quick commerce. The combined numbers made Eternal a case study in disciplined post-IPO scaling of an Indian consumer-internet conglomerate.

Zomato's July 2021 IPO raised about 9,375 crore rupees, then among the largest Indian technology listings. The offer drew outsized retail and institutional interest and validated the loss-making-platform listing thesis on Indian exchanges, even though the shares would trade well below issue price for an extended stretch after the post-listing pop.

The 2022 Blinkit acquisition — an all-stock deal worth roughly 568 million dollars — wedged Zomato into quick commerce, the 10–15-minute grocery category that Albinder Dhindsa's startup was pioneering. Goyal's defence of the deal rested on the thesis that convenience, once tasted, becomes addictive; Blinkit would later become Eternal's largest business by order value.

A January 2026 disclosure noted that Eternal's Q1 PAT had jumped on the back of Blinkit's improving operating performance — a clean inversion of the early-2020s narrative that quick commerce would structurally burn cash. The result validated Goyal's patience in funding Blinkit through three loss-making years before the unit inflected.

After stepping down as Eternal CEO, Goyal has begun preparing Temple — a forehead-worn wellness device measuring the body's metabolic state in real time, priced around a thousand dollars and targeted at athletes, founders and executives. The device marks Goyal's first major venture outside the food delivery orbit and a pivot toward deep-tech health hardware.

Zomato reported its first quarterly profit in 2023, a milestone Goyal attributed to scale efficiencies, advertising monetisation and a tightening of zone-level delivery economics. The break into the green was read across the startup ecosystem as evidence that Indian consumer-internet firms could graduate from cash-burn to operating profit without ceding growth.

In February 2025 the listed entity renamed itself Eternal Ltd, with consumer-facing brands Zomato and Blinkit continuing under their existing names. Goyal framed the change as a structural recognition that the parent had become a portfolio of multiple consumer-internet businesses rather than a single food brand — an unusual mid-cap rename by Indian corporate-governance standards.

Goyal announced in January 2026 that he would step down as CEO and Managing Director of Eternal from 1 February, handing the role to Blinkit founder Albinder Dhindsa while remaining vice chairman for long-term strategy and governance. He described the move as a 'change in title, not in commitment,' signalling a founder-led succession choreography that recalled the Bansals' post-Walmart handoff.

Forbes estimated Goyal's net worth at roughly 1.4 billion dollars as of mid-2026, mostly tied to his Eternal stake. He has since signalled appetite for a second act outside food delivery, including a forehead-worn metabolic-monitoring wearable called Temple priced at about a thousand dollars — an early-stage health-tech bet rather than a fully commercialised venture.

Zomato was incorporated on 18 January 2010 as DC Foodiebay Online Services, having started life informally on 10 July 2008 as a restaurant-listing site run by two Bain consultants. The founders — Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah — moved from menu digitisation to ratings, photos and reviews, building the aggregator playbook that competitors would later copy across emerging markets.

From 2011 to 2015 Zomato entered more than 20 countries — from the UAE, Sri Lanka and Qatar in 2012 to New Zealand, Turkey, Brazil, Indonesia, Chile, Portugal, Canada and Ireland by 2015. The 2015 acquisition of Seattle-based Urbanspoon was the boldest move, plugging Zomato directly into the U.S. and Australian markets and pitting it against Yelp and Foursquare.

By 2015 Zomato's board had concluded that menu aggregation alone was a thin moat; the company moved into food delivery in India, initially outsourcing last-mile logistics to Delhivery, Grab and Runnr. The Runnr acquisition in 2017 in-sourced the fleet and gave Zomato the operational backbone to compete with Swiggy on its own terms.

In March 2019 Zomato sold its UAE food-delivery business to Talabat, an early instance of the company exiting markets where the local density was unattractive. The pattern would intensify after 2022 as Zomato quietly wound down most international operations, liquidating ten overseas subsidiaries in under a year — a rare case of a unicorn voluntarily unwinding a global footprint.

In January 2020 Zomato absorbed Uber Eats India through an all-stock transaction worth around 206 million dollars, leaving Uber with a 9.99 percent holding. Uber Eats India had been sub-5-percent on volume; the deal pushed Zomato's share of the domestic food-delivery market to roughly 52 percent, consolidating the duopoly that would define the next phase.

During the 2020 lockdown Zomato temporarily ran a Zomato Market grocery service across more than 80 cities and trialled alcohol delivery in West Bengal, Jharkhand and Odisha. Both experiments were discontinued — alcohol delivery in April 2021, with management citing weak unit economics and scale concerns — but the grocery pilot seeded the eventual Blinkit thesis.

The company was hit by a 2017 security breach in which about 17 million user records were stolen. The incident prompted Zomato to publish a detailed technical post-mortem explaining how the breach occurred, a transparency choice that contrasted with the more reticent handling of similar incidents at peer platforms and which Goyal later cited as a governance touchstone.

Zomato's product breadth — intercity Legends delivery, hyperlocal Xtreme parcel service, Feeding India food-donation vertical, and Post Malone / Dua Lipa concerts under Zomato Live — reflected a portfolio approach to the food surface area. Several bets (Legends, Xtreme) were shuttered after limited traction, while others (Hyperpure, going-out vertical District) survived and became expansion arrows in the Eternal structure.

As of 2023 Zomato provided food delivery and table reservation services across more than 800 Indian cities, while restaurant discovery was restricted to the UAE following the international exits. The refocus on India signalled management's bet that scale at home, rather than footprint abroad, would compound margins and justify the post-IPO valuation re-rating.