From Noun To Verb: Can Dunzo Do A Zoom?

It has raised close to ₹880 crore in six years, earned ₹27.5 crore and lost ₹338.4 crore. Critics may scoff, but Dunzo’s backers are not complaining, and co-founder Kabeer Biswas is chilled out

- Rajiv Singh

“Itna kya serious hai baap. Thoda chill ho na. Log hain, bolenge” (Why are you so serious, man? Relax a bit. People will say what they have to).

Kabeer Biswas has the swagger of a man who appears cut off from the outside world, especially if the outside world doesn’t fit into his ‘world’. “If you are a consumer,” Dunzo’s co-founder underlines, “I will fall over backwards to solve your problem.” “But if you are not, I don’t care about your views,” the 35-year-old entrepreneur says, flashing a disarming smile.

It’s a chilly Friday morning in Delhi and we are just five minutes into the Zoom interview call in January. Dressed in a Dunzobranded blue jacket, Biswas turns up the heat with his blunt take on a subject that has been used to wage a relentless attack on the CEO of the Bengaluru-based hyperlocal delivery startup over the last two years: Its losses. In 2019, critics ruthlessly exposed the gross mismatch between the top line and the bottom line of the Google-backed venture. A staggering loss of ₹168.8 crore on operational revenue of a paltry ₹77 lakh didn’t seem to make any sense.

A year later, in FY20, there was a growth surge. Revenue was now up to ₹27.5 crore. But so was the loss—more than two times that of the previous year, at ₹359.5-crore.

Founded in January 2015, Dunzo has loaded itself with $121 million (around ₹880 crore) from a battery of marquee investors such as Google, Lightbox, Evolvence, Hana Financial Investment, LGT Aspada, and Alteria Capital. The six-year-old venture happens to be Google’s first direct investment in a homegrown startup in India when it reportedly led a $12 million funding round in December 2017.