Key takeaways
- Started in 2008 as Foodiebay, a menu-PDF aggregator built on an office network; renamed Zomato in 2010.
- Its July 2021 IPO at ₹76 was the largest Indian tech listing of its time, then fell below issue price for 18 months.
- The 2022 Blinkit acquisition (₹4,447 crore), mocked as a money pit, became its most valuable franchise.
- By 2026 Blinkit handles over a million orders a day and the parent, renamed Eternal, trades well above its IPO price.
- 2008 Bain analysts Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah build a food-menu PDF aggregator on the office network and call it Foodiebay.
- 2010 It is renamed Zomato and becomes a restaurant search-and-reviews platform.
- 2014 Zomato pivots from listings to food delivery, unpopular at the time, but the start of the real business.
- 2018 It acquires Uber Eats India, becoming one of the country’s two food-delivery majors alongside Swiggy.
- Jul 2021 Zomato’s IPO at ₹76 a share is the largest Indian tech listing to date; the stock then trades below issue price for 18 months.
- 2022 It acquires Blinkit for ₹4,447 crore. The market calls it a money pit.
- 2023 Zomato posts its first quarterly profit as Blinkit’s growth accelerates.
- 2024 The parent is renamed Eternal Limited, with Zomato, Blinkit and Hyperpure sitting beneath it.
- 2025 Blinkit overtakes Zomato in monthly transacting users; quick commerce becomes the growth story food delivery alone could never have been.
- 2026 Eternal trades at multiples of its 2021 IPO price, Blinkit handles over a million orders a day, and the once-derided acquisition is India’s most valuable quick-commerce franchise.
Eternal, the company most Indians still know as Zomato, has made a habit of doing the unpopular thing and being proved right a few years later. From listings to delivery, from food to a quick-commerce acquisition the market called a money pit, each pivot cost money up front and bought a decade of optionality. Here is the journey, year by year.
The pattern is the point
Every pivot was unpopular in the moment, listings to delivery, food-only to category expansion, and a struggling quick-commerce buy that looked like a cash drain. Each cost money, and each bought a decade of optionality. The valuation, in the end, accrued to the company willing to solve hard logistics problems before the market understood the unit economics.
