Founder
December 2014. Three friends, ₹5–7 lakh.
Founder · CEO · Director · Operator
Tanutejas Saraswat
Ten years. One company.
A ₹700 order became ₹1,200 crore.
Acquired by udaan, 2025.
₹700First order. Dec 2014.
50,000+Retailers served.
₹1,200 CrPeak revenue.
$88.5MAcquired by udaan.
Backed by Info Edge, Sixth Sense, Oman India, Incubate Fund, Akatsuki, Trifecta. $58M raised.
Sources: MCA · RoC filings · The Economic Times · Dainik Bhaskar · Forbes India
The record
Four roles. One company.
CEO
From ₹700 to ₹1,200 crore.
Director
On the board, incorporation to acquisition.
Operator
Warehouses. Routes. Margins. 16 cities.
Integrity & Endurance
3,650 Days · 0 Breakups
Three founders. Ten years. The same three.
In a startup ecosystem defined by co-founder fallouts, Deepak Dhanotiya, Sumit Ghorawat, and I started with ₹5–7 lakh in 2014, survived zero-cash moments, scaled to ₹1,200 crore revenue, and completed an $88.5M acquisition together without ever splitting. True endurance is built on loyalty.
Selected outcomes
What ten years produced.
01
National scale
Took ShopKirana from a single Indore warehouse to a distribution network serving 50,000+ retailers across 16 cities and six states.
02
Expansion engine
Built the city-launch playbook — assortment, pricing, staffing, supply — and ran it fast enough to open a new operating city roughly every 15 days at peak.
03
Private label
Built a ₹100 Cr+ private-label business from zero — staples, personal care, general merchandise — owning the product from sourcing to shelf.
04
Supply chain
Redesigned multi-tier warehousing and last-mile routing to lift fill rates to 98% while cutting cost-to-serve by 18%.
05
P&L ownership
Owned a ₹500 Cr+ category P&L — pricing, margin, working capital, vendor terms.
06
Capital
Raised Series A, B and C alongside the founding team — Info Edge, Sixth Sense, Incubate Fund, Akatsuki, Oman India, Trifecta. $58M in total, then the board through the exit.
07
Team
Scaled and led a 1,500-person organisation at peak across operations, category, sales and supply chain — and built the senior bench that ran it.
08
Technology
Shipped the ordering, inventory and route-planning systems the network ran on, every day.
09
Brand partnerships
Partnered directly with 300+ leading brands, managing and distributing over 2,000 SKUs to kirana retailers.
10
Retention
Lifted retailer repeat rate past 85% through assortment design, service levels, and credit built for small shops.
11
Outcome
Completed an exit valued at $88.5M, returning capital to the investors and the team who built it.
Now
Actively Building
The next company starts with all four roles in the room.
Building the tools I wished existed for those ten years.
Tool 01 — The credit trap A working model of how terms and growth consume cash.
—
days left
Life is too short for ugly products.
About
Built on the shop floor.
I spent ten years on loading docks, riding delivery trucks, and listening to kirana store owners talk about their credit cycles and razor-thin margins.
Warehouses. Routes. Margins. People.
That is where I learned what software can solve — and where software gets rejected. That is still how I think and build every single day.
“Scale is an operating discipline, not a growth chart.”
As covered Forbes India Crunchbase The Economic Times
Contact
Talk is cheap. The floor keeps score.
We turned a ₹700 order into a ₹1,200 crore national machine and an $88.5M exit — not with pitch decks, but with 3,650 days of ruthless operating discipline across 16 cities. I don't do casual networking. I back and build with obsessives.
Brutal Unit Economics & Scale
Bleeding working capital, leaking margins in multi-tier warehouses, or hitting a wall at scale? Send me your raw P&L and bottlenecks. I diagnose the root causes textbooks miss.
AI That Survives The Shop Floor
Silicon Valley builds dashboards for air-conditioned boardrooms. Real commerce runs on dusty docks, kirana counters, and broken routes. If you’re building AI that gets its hands dirty — let’s build.
⚡️ I reply to founders and operators with fire in their eyes.
📍 Based in Indore · Frequent in Bengaluru & Delhi · If you're building the impossible, coffee is on me.