Voyage Capital: Conviction Call on Quick Commerce in India

Pratham joined Voyage Capital, IIM Indore's student-led investment fund, as a Senior Member managing a corpus of INR 16 lakh contributed by over 105 investors. His formal coverage responsibility was telecom and oil and gas in the listed equity space. But the call that defined his time there came from outside his assigned sectors.

When Eternal (then Zomato) was trading below its listing price and the broader market was skeptical about quick commerce, Pratham noticed something in consumer behavior around him. People were ordering from Blinkit regularly, and the habit was sticking. The prevailing view in his fund and in the market more broadly was that 10-minute delivery was a gimmick, that it had failed in developed markets, and that the unit economics could not work.

Pratham's counter-thesis rested on a structural difference: India's labor cost base made the model viable in a way it had not been in the US or Europe. He built out the financial and sector analysis, presented the case to the full fund membership, and secured agreement to allocate a portion of the corpus to the position. He also invested personal capital in Zomato alongside the fund.

The thesis was not that quick commerce was already profitable, but that the behavior was sticky, the addressable market was large, and the cost structure in India made a path to profitability credible. The jury on profitability timing remains open, but the behavioral adoption the thesis predicted has materialized.