Online food delivery platform Zomato’s business has been booming since 2020, as people have resorted to ordering food online after they were deprived of going to restaurants during the pandemic. In fact, the company had said that the pandemic had accelerated its journey to profitability despite initial hiccups. Its revenue for the financial year 2020 (FY20) grew by leaps and bounds. With its $1.1 billion IPO coming up soon, the start-up promoted its Chief People Officer Akriti Chopra to a co-founder, according to an internal email shared by Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal.
Chopra has worked with Zomato for over a decade in various positions, starting as senior finance and operations manager and establishing and ramping up business finance functions across all verticals. She played a key role in building the company’s in-house Legal, Governance, Risk, and Compliance teams and was indispensable in facilitating Zomato’s multiple funding rounds and acquisitions as well as setting up its international presence as a part of the Global Growth and International Operations teams.
Chopra “has an undying commitment to Zomato and our well-being. She has been one of the strongest pillars of support for Zomato as we weathered multiple ups and downs through these years,” Goyal said. He added that her work has played an important role as the company prepares for its IPO, congratulating her for acquiring the new position.
Chopra had been Zomato’s CFO till October, but she left soon after the company’s plans to go public were made known, since “the CFO role started becoming more of an external-facing role in the run-up to our IPO. Spotting talent, getting out of their way, and actually helping them succeed is what Akriti did so super comfortably with Akshant (her successor). I only aspire to be able to do this as easily as her when it’s my time to hand over,” said Goyal, adding that the quality of her work, her work ethic, and the insane ownership of the team she has built, all shone very brightly (and continues to) over the last few months as Zomato is gearing up for one of the most-anticipated IPOs of the year.
Zomato has done similar “elevations” of an employee to a founder with Mohit Gupta and Gaurav Gupta, the CEO of its food delivery business and Zomato COO respectively.
The start-up had raised $250 million in its funding round in February, led by existing investors Tiger Global, Kora, and Fidelity, reaching a valuation of $5.4 billion. In April, it had filed for an IPO with the Securities Exchange Board of India (SEBI), as it planned to raise ₹8,250 crores (roughly $1.1 billion) this year amid the growing business in the pandemic.
