Saving Private Dunzo: Where's The White Knight?

The next 60 days will be crucial for the quick commerce startup. Out of money, it urgently needs an investor

- Madhurima Nandy & Ranjani Raghavan

Many years ago, an executive rushing between meetings in his Bengaluru office hit himself against a revolving door and broke his Timex watch. A friend then connected him to a company that ran a concierge service for busy professionals over WhatsApp, the popular messaging app.

Kabeer Biswas, one of the founders of that service, created a chat group and within a short time, the executive had options for watch repair shops in his neighbourhood. A delivery boy came over, collected the watch, got it fixed and delivered it back-in a few hours.

"I was in meetings and my schedule was tight. I did not have the time to fix it. But the work was done for around 200," the executive, who declined to be named, said.

That concierge service was the earliest version of Dunzo Digital Pvt. Ltd, now a popular quick commerce company, that almost became a unicorn, or a company with a valuation of over a billion dollars, last year. In January 2022, Dunzo was valued at about $775 million.

In its avatar as a concierge service provider, Dunzo would pick up groceries and deliver them at your apartment; drop off forgotten items at your office; make copies of house keys; pick up your car from the garage and even deliver bouquets to a friend.

But there were too many workflows and all of them were on WhatsApp. With some seed funding, the company moved from WhatsApp to an app. The human concierge service was replaced by technology. In this iteration, Dunzo restricted itself to being a logistics provider-it would pick and drop items as required by users.

This service took off and it scaled rapidly. At the height of the startup capital boom, in mid-2021, Dunzo added quick commerce to its product offerings and raised money from the likes of Reliance Retail Ventures Ltd and Google LLC. Overall, Dunzo raised close to $470 million till date. Quick commerce is delivery of groceries in quick time, often within an hour of placing an order.