Navneet Singh used to work a six-day week and spending two hours of his only day off at the grocery store wasn’t the most appealing idea. “I wanted to spend that time with family,” says the co-founder of Peppertap, an online grocery start-up. He started the firm in November 2014, and the app raised $10 million from Saif Partners and Sequoia Capital in April 2015. It offers more than 15,000 SKUs across staple foods, dairy products, household items, fresh fruits and vegetables.

“We started out only for Gurgaon but are now available across Delhi and Pune (east). We will soon also go live in Hyderabad and Bengaluru,” he adds. He hopes to take his app to Chennai and Mumbai to achieve the target of 10 cities by the end of the year. 

As of now, Peppertap gets about 3,000 orders a day but the number is growing. “Our differentiator is that we deliver your order within two hours at a competitive price,” claims Singh. The hyper-local model is what gives him confidence. “We tie up with well-organised and large grocery stores in specific localities,” he says. Peppertap earns its margin from the service charge paid by the stores — it has tied up with 35 in NCR and seven in Pune — for each transaction.

“Ours is a capital-efficient model. We haven’t spent huge sums on building warehouses or buying inventory from FMCG players. In the next six months, our Gurgaon operations will break even. As a whole, since we are expanding fast, we will probably break even two years down the line,” he says.