The company also appointed former Zomato executive Sajal Gupta as the company’s CTO.
Arora’s rise as co-founder follows this
The exit of Blinkit cofounder Saurabh Kumar in June last year. Kumar started another company called Warply, which delivers everything from groceries to electronics in 30 minutes.
The startup said on June 10 that it was halting operations due to “lack of technical infrastructure” at local stores, which are being used for last mile delivery. The startup said that it will be relaunching the app soon.
Arora has been with Blinkit, formerly known as Grofers, for more than eight years and held the position of senior vice president of operations prior to his promotion. Meanwhile, according to Gupta’s LinkedIn profile, Gupta was with Zomato for five years before moving to Blinkit in January.
According to the source cited above, the promotion was announced through internal communication platform Slack. Zomato and Blinkit did not respond to queries sent by ET.
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Currently, Zomato is in the midst of closing its $578 million deal to acquire Blinkit. ET reported on July 4 that a group of Mumbai-based high net worth investors have complained to the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) that
Zomato did not timely disclose to the stock exchanges about the purchase of Blinkit.
Zomato shares tumbled after the board cleared the deal on June 24 and saw a fall in valuation of Rs 12,000 crore, which is almost three times Blinkit’s valuation of Rs 4,447.5 crore. As of Friday evening, Zomato’s share price stood at Rs 54.85, which is nearly 28% lower than its issue price of Rs 76.
According to the deal, Blinkit shareholders will get about 7% in Zomato at 70.76 per share. The transaction is expected to close in early August, the company informed the stock exchange. Blinkit had revenue of Rs 22.1 crore in January, its first month of operations as a fully accelerated commerce business. This has increased to Rs 58 crore by May.
In the same month, it saw a Gross Order Value (GOV) of Rs 402.8 crore as compared to Rs 295.5 crore in January.
Blinkit’s revenue includes its marketplace commission income, customer delivery fees, advertising revenue, warehousing and ancillary services income. It is present in the top 15 cities.