Early Mover Zing Abandons Quick Food Delivery, Looks To Pivot To Grocery

Quick launch, quick shutdown. It’s been something of a theme in 2025 so far. Whether it is flash-in-the-pan AI startups or quick commerce first-movers like Zing, the 10-minute food delivery app that has now shut down its operations.

The Delhi NCR-based startup, which launched its services in late 2024 in Gurugram shut down its quick food delivery services.

Zing operated only one kitchen in Gurugram, and the startup had not expanded beyond that despite reports of a seed round by Inshorts cofounder Azhar Iqubal. 

Recent reviews on the Google Play Store also indicate that new signups and logins have been put on hold. Further, the startup’s LinkedIn page shows that most of its employees have moved out with a threadbare workforce still linked to the company.

Cofounder Tarun Arora while speaking to Inc42 confirmed that they have shut down food delivery operations, instead are now pivoting to quick commerce delivery of perishable products.. 

How Zing Burst On To The Scene

Childhood friends Tarun Arora and Rachit Sahi founded Zing in October 2024 and brought on  Inshorts cofounder Azhar Iqbal as an angel investor. The idea was sparked by their desire for quick, fresh meals. They saw an opportunity to create a “better Blinkit” for freshly cooked snacks, offering everyday favourites like paranthas, sandwiches, poha, and chai.

Speaking to Inc42, Arora said that the startup had overestimated demand for quick food delivery. 

“Even if we were serving poha within 10 mins, customers wanted to order poha from their favourite restaurant instead,” Arora said, adding that the inventory cost rose, and there wasn’t enough demand for its services.  

Besides this, given the capex-heavy nature of quick food delivery, Zing’s inability to raise a fresh round is also likely to have played a part in the lack of expansion. 

For context, Swish, a quick food delivery startup which started its operations around the same time as Zing, has already raised $16 Mn. In contrast, Iqbal had invested $250K in Zing Food. 

In the early months, Zing claimed to have seen a strong early traction. It said it had reached 150 daily orders within just three months and saw a significant month-on-month revenue increase, from INR 1.5 Lakhs in November 2024 to INR 8 Lakhs by January 2025. 

The startup had ambitious plans to expand to 10 additional cloud kitchens in Gurugram by the end of 2025, targeting an annual revenue run rate of INR 60 Cr. 

As for the pivot, Arora claimed instead of setting up dark stores, the startup is now onboarding premium retailers on its platform and will deliver their fresh items such as fruits and vegetables to customers in 30 minutes from these stores. This is extremely similar to the model adopted and scaled by Dunzo between 2016 and 2020, but the quick commerce onslaught ended in Dunzo shutting down.

Zing expects to start its operations in the next 20 days in Gurugram. It is not yet clear whether the founder will retain the brand name “Zing” for its quick commerce pivot. Arora claimed the startup is close to raising  a small cheque from angel investors. 

It is pertinent to note that, Zing was at the centre of a data security breach in June 2025 when the app’s backend exposed sensitive user data, including order history, and data about the operations such as  total revenue for the store and average order value.  

According to X user Ujjwal Dimri, who reported the vulnerability, he attempted to notify Zing’s team but didn’t receive any response. 

It needs to be highlighted that Zing Food’s parent entity Nara Video Tech Private Limited operated a different app called Lucid App earlier. Regulatory filings for Lucid App shows it had raised funding from Azhar Iqbal and other angel investors. 

While little is known about Lucid App, the founders shifted their focus to launch Zing Food in 2024. The launch of the quick commerce business, seems to be the third pivot for Nara Video Tech Private Limited.

Quick Food Is A Tough Game

On paper, quick food delivery looks like an attractive business model, but in reality, it’s a cash intensive operation with weak unit economics.

Take Zepto Cafe, for instance, the first attempt at 10 mins food delivery in India. Once touted as a growth driver for the $7 Bn valued startup, the vertical is now scaling down. Despite heavy investments, Inc42 has learnt over 50 Zepto Cafe have already been shut, with more closures happening each month. Order volumes, too, have dropped sharply, from a peak of 1 lakh daily orders to nearly half that number. 

According to a person aware of internal developments, several senior leaders have exited, signaling that Zepto Cafe, once Zepto’s crown jewel, has now turned into a money drain. 

“This kind of quick snack delivery primarily thrives around corporate parks. Orders from residential areas are minimal,” said an analyst to Inc42.

Adding to the challenge is intensifying competition. Blinkit’s Bistro, Swiggy’s Snacc, and Rebel Foods’ Quickes are vying for the same space, eating into each other’s market share. 

Meanwhile, Swish, another new age funded startup, has been expanding cautiously, limiting its operations to select Bengaluru neighbourhoods. 

Even the giants are treading carefully. Despite their deep pockets, Swiggy and Zomato have yet to disclose any performance metrics for Snacc or Bistro. In fact, Zomato, in a bid to fix its unit economics, shut down its 15 mins food delivery arm, Quick, in Q1 FY26.

Across the board, these brands face the fundamental challenge, ensuring faster deliveries and maintaining product quality, all while fixing their broken unit economics.

Casualties In The Quick Delivery Wave

Zing’s food delivery exit comes after fast fashion brand Blip also bowed out of the quick commerce race in July this year. 

Like Zing, Blip was a first mover in the quick fashion delivery space. Despite this advantage, the startup could not sustain itself given the high capital needs for expansion and setting up the supply chain.  

While both Blip and Zing Food were in different categories, their core proposition remained the same: fast fulfilment, which is an operationally heavy exercise. Plus, the paucity in delivery workers —  as indicated by giants such as Eternal and Swiggy in recent disclosures — is another major hurdle, especially for food delivery. 

Quick delivery model requires a high upfront investment in logistics infrastructure, inventory management systems, warehousing and delivery fleets. Without sustained funding, these costs quickly become unsustainable, especially at a time when customer acquisition and retention require aggressive spending. 

With well capitalised players struggling to scale up, the problems of the quick food delivery model become well apparent. Zing may not be the first to succumb to the headwinds, and VC-backed startups like Swish still have to find the right formula to capitalise on this early momentum. Scale and volume is critical in the food delivery game. 

Will 10-minute food delivery startups that don’t manage to crack scale within a matter of months disappear as quickly as it arrived? 

Edited By Nikhil Subramaniam