Zepto Ads
Zepto is one of India’s fastest-scaling quick-commerce platforms. The ads business existed but was early: revenue was real, the surface area was growing, yet monetization lagged the demand on both sides of the marketplace. I joined to own ads and monetization end to end — onboarding, product, marketing, pricing, and the systems that decide what gets shown, to whom, at what price.
A quick-commerce ad business growing fast but monetizing below its ceiling, with platform take and advertiser returns both under potential.
The category treated Ad income as a merchandising alternative. I treated it as a marketing problem which brands were trying to solve.
Invested in Sales Enablement products over core Ad Platforms because the initial revenue bottleneck was there
Sequenced GTM so supply (advertiser onboarding, self-serve) and demand (high-intent surfaces) scaled in lockstep — avoiding the classic ad-platform failure of selling inventory that doesn’t convert.
Ad Platform was built to unlock capabilities not available in the market and specific needs of Zepto Advertisers — not to scratch an itch or stake a claim
The hardest part wasn’t the auction — it was holding the line on customer experience while revenue was compounding 5x. Every ₹ of ad revenue is a small tax on relevance, and the temptation to over-monetize is strongest exactly when the numbers are going up. The discipline that worked: make the ad-to-GMV ceiling an explicit, defended number, not an emergent one. If I did it again I’d instrument customer-side guardrails even earlier — before the revenue curve made them inconvenient to add.