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July 13, 2026
Sowmya Ramasubramanian, Vaeshnavi Kasthuril (MINT)
Bengaluru, 13 July 2026
India’s vertical quick-commerce startups across categories like baby care, medicines and fashion, backed by venture capital heavyweights, are beginning to redefine what “quick” means.
For some, the race is no longer about cutting delivery times by a few more minutes. Instead, founders are increasingly talking about better assortment, sharper curation, stronger supply chains and healthier unit economics as the factors that will decide whether the model survives.
Baby care platform Ozi, backed by Blume Ventures and RTP Global, has settled on a roughly 60-minute delivery promise. Founder Amit Sah told Mint the company would rather optimise for “quality selection” than chase ultra-fast deliveries, arguing that customers today are looking for reliable availability and curated choices rather than insisting on receiving products in 10 minutes.
Lightspeed-backed fashion startup Slikk is pursuing a similar path. Founder Akshay Gulati said the company’s focus since inception has been building a wide catalogue rather than aggressively acquiring users.
The shift comes as the sector enters a more pragmatic phase. Quick fashion startup Blip shut down within a year of launch last June, while rival Klydo has recently pivoted its business model, raising questions about the viability of firms in every category.
The crop of vertical quick commerce startups—focused on rapid delivery within a single, specific product category—has largely emerged over the past two years, inspired by the explosive growth of grocery-focused pioneers such as Blinkit, Swiggy Instamart and IPO-bound Zepto, which have accustomed consumers to receiving groceries and everyday essentials within minutes.
Other prominent startups include Plazza for quick delivery of medicines, Instafix for mobile repairs within minutes, and Dazzl for at-home salon services.
Kalaari Capital noted in its 2025 report that quick commerce had already captured about two-thirds of online grocery orders and around 10% of India’s overall e-retail spending in 2024, transforming consumer behaviour and building the infrastructure for specialised vertical players to emerge.
“Speed was never a real moat but became a hygiene factor once every significant player could promise 10-30 minute delivery,” said Devangshu Dutta, founder and chief executive of consultancy Third Eyesight. “Assortment depth, availability, trust, and sustained price-value have been, and will remain, the true differentiation levers. For categories such as medicines and baby products, credibility and compliance outweigh saved minutes, apart from urgent purchases.”
“Unit economics can become healthier only where there’s a clear reason for frequent and repeated purchases. Groceries and medicines are repeat, low consideration categories, while fashion is high consideration, driven by fit, styling and browsing. The best quick commerce categories have low or no returns and high order frequency, whereas rapid fashion delivery faces high return rates due to product mismatch against customer expectations (sizing, fit, fabric and colour),” Dutta said.
Different categories, different playbooks
While fashion startups are investing heavily in discovery and inventory refreshes, Ozi believes the opportunity in baby care lies in curation and premiumisation.
Sah said each sub-category within baby care presents a different operational challenge. Consumables require deep availability of long-tail brands, while fashion depends on filtering products for quality rather than listing everything available. Ozi, which delivers wipes, diapers, and baby food, deliberately curates brands instead of maximising assortment, targeting parents willing to pay slightly more for trusted products.
“The customer behaviour has shifted from discovery first to search first,” Sah said, adding that shoppers today are not necessarily looking for ultra-fast delivery, but nor are they willing to wait several days. “A modern-age customer values quality. They are happy to pay an 8-10% or 12% differential, but they need quicker access to better brands and better assortment.”
Fashion startups argue that their challenge is different altogether.
Gulati said Slikk has built its business around supply rather than customer acquisition, claiming that stronger assortment has helped steadily reduce acquisition costs. The company replaces 30-40% of inventory in every dark store each month and is expanding neighbourhood by neighbourhood instead of spreading rapidly across cities.
Slikk might also consider introducing private brands for apparel, given their higher margins, Gulati said.
Bengaluru-based fast-fashion e-commerce startup Knot, which raised $5 million from 12 Flags and Kae Capital in December 2025, is investing heavily in back-end technology. Its app captures user preferences through swipe-based interactions, while its dark stores carry much wider assortments than horizontal quick commerce operators – offering a vast, multi-category collection of goods – and customise inventory based on local demand.
“We look at fashion as a data science problem and not really an intuition problem,” co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Archit Nanda said.
Nanda said fashion’s long-tail nature—which relies on selling small quantities of several unique products rather than depending on a few popular items – means inventory commonality across dark stores is significantly lower than grocery, requiring specialised supply chains and hyperlocal merchandising.
The profitability test
The changing strategies also reflect growing investor scrutiny of unit economics.
Slikk’s Gulati said investors continue to back the category but increasingly want proof that businesses can balance growth with profitability rather than relying on heavy customer acquisition spending. He believes execution in neighbourhood-level operations, assortment and brand partnerships will ultimately determine the winner.
Knot’s Nanda said that fashion combines high average order values with healthy margins, making the category attractive despite its complexity.
However, analysts believe that not every vertical is equally suited to the model.
“Looking ahead, horizontal cross-subsidy will work better, with established, well-capitalised players (Myntra’s M-Now, Nykaa Now) including quick delivery into an existing catalogue and logistics network rather than building it standalone. For narrow, high-trust verticals (medicines, baby care) where the value is availability and authenticity rather than impulse, and where margins can support the delivery cost, quick commerce can work,” Dutta noted.
Kalaari Capital’s 2025 report on vertical quick commerce similarly argued that specialised players will win by solving category-specific pain points, with assortment depth, customer experience, and category expertise emerging as key differentiators.
(Published in MINT)
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December 3, 2024
Writankar Mukherjee, Economic Times
3 December 2024
Flipkart is set to shortly start delivering medicines within 10 minutes, likely becoming the first quick commerce service to do so, intensifying competition in this red-hot market.
The Walmart-owned company’s Flipkart Minutes service has started enlisting local chemists in the metros from where the products will be sold using its last mile delivery partners, said a senior industry executive aware of the plans.
Flipkart is hurrying since it wants to be the first quick commerce service to sell prescription medicines. To be sure, the company’s partnerships with local chemists needs to be in sync with India’s drug norms for foreign-backed e-commerce operators which bars owning inventory. Also, Flipkart can forge tie-ups only with registered chemists.
“Flipkart wants to develop Flipkart Minutes into a full-fledged quick commerce platform. Medicines is a hitherto untapped opportunity since existing platforms deliver products in an hour to even 3-5 days,” said the executive cited above. “Flipkart will provide the platform for these orders and undertake the last mile fulfilment with its logistic partners, while the product will be sold by the local pharmacies who have all the valid licences,” the executive said.
Flipkart did not respond to ET’s email queries. Analysts said quick commerce for medicines is an untapped area so far but has high potential with healthier margins than food and groceries.
Devangshu Dutta, chief executive at consulting firm Third Eyesight, pointed out that undertaking quick commerce for pharmaceutical products would be a logistics-based issue and would need partnering with a broad network of stores.
“There are no real demand-side or supply problems for quick commerce in medicines in cities. Players like Flipkart have the edge of being a high traffic platform and a robust last mile delivery network. However, critically, the medicine business is also about discounts which can make a real difference for chronic patients or for long-duration and expensive treatments,” he said.
With the latest venture, Flipkart will deepen its presence in quick commerce and the online medicine segment, currently dominated by Reliance Retail-owned Netmeds, Tata 1mg and Apollo Pharmacy.
In 2021, Flipkart took a majority stake in Kolkata-based SastaSundar Marketplace, which owned and operated an online pharmacy marketplace and digital healthcare platform. Through this deal, Flipkart ventured into the health segment and integrated it into its main e-commerce platform selling medicines and other healthcare products.
Flipkart is a late entrant into India’s thriving quick commerce market that has the presence of Zomato’s Blinkit, Swiggy’s Instamart, Tata Group’s BigBasket and Zepto among others. Flipkart rival, Amazon, sells grocery and other products through its Amazon Fresh service but it has yet to foray into quick commerce.
Flipkart Minutes went live in Bengaluru this August and it is currently operational in Bengaluru, Delhi-NCR and Mumbai. The company is preparing to extend the service to launch it in a total of top 8-10 cities including Kolkata, Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai.
Flipkart has partnered with local grocers, kirana stores, besides adding its existing sellers in the marketplace for fulfilling grocery orders under Minutes. It is betting on free deliveries besides having a wider selection than existing quick commerce operators across most categories.
“Almost 60% of the orders are fulfilled by local grocers and some of the large sellers in the platform are also moving for quick commerce deliveries. Apart from opening new dark stores, Flipkart is also repurposing its existing city warehouses for grocery deliveries and as dark stores for Minutes,” the executive said.
According to a recent report by Grant Thornton Bharat, India’s quick commerce market is expected to surge nearly threefold to $9.94 billion by 2029 from $3.34 billion at present. The market expanded 76% year-on-year in 2023-24.
(Published in Economic Times)
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March 25, 2020
T. Surendar, The Morning Context
25 March 2020
Standing on the porch of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Mumbai suburbs, Diwakar Vaish, co-founder of Noida-based AgVa Healthcare, was trying to catch the attention of software industry executives. This is at the annual conference hosted by IT trade body Nasscom. Vaish’s stall was a side-show for startups to exhibit digital technologies in the healthcare sector.
On a cool, breezy February day, the atmosphere was nothing as grim you would expect in a hospital emergency ward. Vaish’s rig, comprising an iPad-like device on a short steel column mounted on wheels with dangling wires, was a cost-effective version of a ventilator used in critical care. There wasn’t much excitement about his solution, as few executives really understood the medical problem he aimed to solve.
Today, a robotic engineer by training, Vaish is super busy.
It is not easy to get him on the phone, as AgVa’s ventilator is suddenly in demand from all parts of the country. The company is running three shifts fulfilling orders, which have been pouring in since it became apparent that Indian hospitals did not have enough ventilators for patients rendered ill by the novel coronavirus.
Unwittingly, the need for ventilators has once again drawn attention to India’s medical devices industry or the lack of it. So much so that Anand Mahindra, chairman of the $17 billion Mahindra group, which has interests in automobiles, software and resorts, said that he was finding ways to manufacture ventilators in his factories. It isn’t easy putting together a ventilator, not when you are racing against time, but Mahindra is a hardy businessman with deep pockets, and maybe, just maybe, he will succeed.
In many ways, the Indian medical devices industry is an anomaly. India has a space programme, a nuclear programme, it is among the few countries that has developed patented medicines and a low cost version of anything from power turbines to trucks but when it comes to medical equipment, it fares poorly.
India is also the biggest supplier of FDA-approved drugs to the US, the biggest pharmaceutical market in the world. Even as the Indian market for medical equipment has grown at double-digit rates in the last five years to Rs 1 lakh crore, two-thirds of its needs are met by foreign companies such as Philips, GE Healthcare, Siemens and Abbott.
Import domination is all pervasive extending to even non-critical but common equipment like sonography machines, dentistry chairs and diagnostic equipment. Less than five Indian companies had revenue of more than Rs 500 crore a year and 90% were classified as small scale, with annual revenue less than Rs 10 crore. The biggest player in the domestic market is the Rs 1,300 crore Mumbai-based Transasia Bio-Medicals, which makes in vitro diagnostic solutions that are exported to Western markets too.
“For a long time, the government was the biggest buyer of medical equipment and they always preferred imported equipment. That meant that it was not lucrative for local entrepreneurs to invest their capital in the sector,” says G.S.K. Velu, managing director of Trivitron Healthcare, which makes and exports imaging equipment.
The proliferation of private hospitals in the last two decades also did not change things much. With well-entrenched foreign players and a liberal import duty structure to make available the best facilities in India, there were few local companies of scale who could invest big money to fend off competition. AgVa’s ventilators were priced at a fifth of the ones sold by the foreign competitors, yet it couldn’t make inroads into big hospitals. “It’s almost as if our cost was our barrier to sell. Being critical equipment, customers had a lot of inertia to even place test orders,” says Vaish.
Thanks to meagre domestic manufacturing. India also could not set standards of equipment specifications to suit the local needs. It had to tweak its own equipment standards to fall in line with those of foreign manufacturers. For example, in the US, defibrillators used to restore heartbeats by giving shock to patients had to last at least two shock cycles. But, in India, since access to hospitals and medical care was not as easy. patients arrive long after they have suffered heart attacks and Indian doctors use defibrillators for even 10 cycles at a time.
The local standards did not specify this need and as a result many imported defibrillators were not of much use in Indian conditions. “We still don’t have an act to regulate medical devices and it falls under the drugs category. Everything is still borrowed from the West,” says Aniruddha Atre, co-founder and director of Pune-based Jeevtronics Pvt. Ltd, which makes the world’s first hand-cranked defibrillator.
Trivitron’s Velu says that the share of locally produced medical equipment will increase within the next decade. This will be a combination of help from the government which will enforce more domestic manufacturing by overseas firms and increased entrepreneurship.
There is also a view that more global manufacturing will come to India, as firms de-risk their strategy of manufacturing everything in China. “In the past, when labour costs went up in the Chinese west coast, Indian garment companies were beneficiaries of increased orders even though other countries like Bangladesh and Vietnam too got a big share of it. The availability of labour and ability to scale up operations is something global players look for and to that extent India will always be an important outsourcing destination,” said Devangshu Dutta, managing partner at consultancy firm Third Eyesight.
The trend started even before the COVID-19 pandemic as companies in the US began to brace themselves for a trade war with China. For example, a US-based company has started sourcing Indian tyres at a 10-15% premium as it wants to diversify its risk from China. “India has witnessed a surge in mobile phone manufacturing. This is bound to increase the ecosystem in electronic manufacturing which in turn create ecosystems for industries like medical equipment,” says Sharad Verma, senior partner who oversees industrials at Boston Consulting Group.
The timing is also right for increase in local manufacturing, argues Verma. One of the important criteria for that is viable domestic consumption. It’s happened time and again in sectors like automobiles, mobile phones and more recently in manufacture of metro bogies after domestic consumption has reached a scale where it makes sense for companies to set up manufacturing facilities. “The industry is no longer small and the incidence of medical technology will only go up from here making it viable for even foreign companies to look at a manufacturing set up in India,” says Verma.
It will be interesting to see how it all plays out. The sector, so far, hasn’t seen much by way of private equity or venture investment. The most prominent one was an investment by a Morgan Stanley fund and Samara Capital in Surat-based Sahajanand Medical Technologies and Fidelity Growth Partners’s investment in Trivitron. But starting 2014, a government fund run by the Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council-incubated several companies who are slowly bringing their products to market. As some of these products hit home, especially in the wake of COVID-19, the action is definitely bound to pick up.
(published in The Morning Context)
Devangshu Dutta
September 28, 2017
In recent decades, the dependence on established medical disciplines has begun to be challenged. There is the oft-quoted dictum that healthcare sector tends to illness rather than health. Another saying goes that some of the food you eat keeps you in good health, but most of what you eat keeps your doctor in good health. With a gap emerging between wellness-seekers and the healthcare sector, so-called “alternative” options are stepping in.
Some of these alternatives actually existed as well-structured and well-documented traditional medical practices for thousands of years before the introduction of more recent Western medical disciplines. This includes India’s Siddha system and Ayurved (literally, “science of life”), which certainly don’t deserve being relegated to an “alternative” footnote. Ayurved is also said to have influenced medicine in China over a millennium ago, through the translation of Indian medical texts into Chinese.
Other than these, there are also more recent inventions riding the “wellness” buzzword. These may draw from the traditional systems and texts, or be built upon new pharmaceutical or nutraceutical formulations. Broader wellness regimens – much like Ayurved and Siddha – blend two or more elements from the following basket: food choices and restrictions, minerals, extracts and supplements, physical exercise and perhaps some form of meditative practices. Wellness, thus, is often characterised by a mix-and-match based on individual choices and conveniences, spiked with celebrity influences.
A key premise driving the wellness sector is that modern medicine depends too heavily on attacking specific issues with single chemicals (drugs) or combinations of single chemicals that are either isolated or synthesised in laboratories, and that it ignores the diversity and complexity of factors contributing to health and well-being. The second major premise for many wellness practitioners (though not all!) is that, provided the right conditions, the body can heal itself. For the consumer the reasons for the surge in demand for traditional wellness solutions include escalating costs of conventional health care, the adverse effects of allopathic drugs, and increasing lifestyle disorders.
After food, wellness has turned into possibly one of the largest consumer industries on the planet. Global pharmaceutical sales are estimated at over US$ 1.1 trillion. In contrast, according to the Global Wellness Institute, the wellness market dwarfs this, estimated at US$ 3.7 trillion (2015). This figure includes a vast range of services such as beauty and anti-ageing, nutrition and weight loss, wellness tourism, fitness and mind-body, preventative and personalized medicine, wellness lifestyle real estate, spa industry, thermal/mineral springs, and workplace wellness. Within this, the so-called “Complementary and Alternative Medicine” is estimated to be about US$200 billion.
There are several reasons why “complementary and alternative medicine” sales are not yet larger. Rooted in economically backward countries such as India, these have been seen as outdated, less effective and even unscientific. In India, the home of Siddha and Ayurved, apart from individual practitioners, several companies such as Baidyanath, Dabur, Himalaya and others were active in the market for decades, but were usually seen as stodgy and products of need, and usually limited to people of the older generations and rural populations. In the West they typically attracted a fringe customer base, or were a last resort for patients who did not find a solution for their specific problem in modern allopathy and hospitals.
However, through the 1970s Ayurved gained in prominence in the West, riding on the New Age movement. Gradually, in recent decades proponents turned to modern production techniques, slick packaging and up-to-date marketing, and even local cultivation in the West of medicinal plants taken from India.
As wellness demonstrated an increasingly profitable vector in the West, Indian entrepreneurs, too, have taken note of this opportunity. Perhaps Shahnaz Husain was one of the earliest movers in the beauty segment, followed by Biotique in the early-1990s that developed a brand driven not just by a specific need but by desire and an approach that was distinctly anti-commodity, the characteristics of any successful brand. Others followed, including FMCG companies such as the multinational giant Unilever. The last decade-and-a-half has also brought the phenomenon called Patanjali, a brand that began with Ayurvedic products and grew into an FMCG and packaged food-empire faster than any other brand before! While a few giants have emerged, the market is still evolving, allowing other brands to develop, whether as standalone names or as extensions of spiritual and holistic healing foundations, such as Sri Sri Tattva, Isha Arogya and others.
An absolutely critical driver of this growth in the Indian market now is the generation that has grown up during the last 25-30 years. It is a class that is driven by choice and modern consumerism, but that also wishes to reconnect with its spiritual and cultural roots. This group is aware of global trends but takes pride in home-grown successes. It is comfortable blending global branded sportswear with yoga or using an Indian ayurvedic treatment alongside an international beauty product.
Of course, there is a faddish dimension to the wellness phenomenon, and it is open to exploitation by poor or ineffective products, non-standard and unscientific treatments, entirely outrageous efficacy claims, and price-gouging.
To remain on course and strengthen, the wellness movement will need structured scientific assessment and development at a larger scale, a move that will need both industry and government to work closely together. Traditional texts would need to be recast in modern scientific frameworks, supported by robust testing and validation. Education needs to be strengthened, as does the use of technology.
However the industry and the government move, from the consumer’s point-of-view the juggernaut is now rolling.
(An edited version of this piece was published in Brand Wagon, Financial Express.)
