Synopsis
Food and grocery delivery firm Eternal has surpassed $10 billion in annual net order value from its B2C operations, a milestone achieved after 18 years. The company anticipates this figure to double to $20 billion within the next two years.Listen to this article in summarized format
Goyal said the company is targeting $1 billion in adjusted Ebitda by FY29.
“You spend years building a track before the first train runs. Our first annual $10 billion in NOV took 18 years. This doubling to $20 billion in annual NOV will take less than two years from here. Similarly, it took 16 years to reach adjusted Ebitda profitability in FY24. From there, we expect to reach $1 billion of adjusted Ebitda, hopefully by FY29,” he said in a letter to shareholders.
“The acceleration is real because the foundation is already laid – the systems, the supply chains, the customer trust, the operational muscle. All of it compounds.”
In FY26, Eternal’s B2C businesses reported adjusted Ebitda of Rs 1,421 crore, or around $150 million at current exchange rates.
Goyal, who founded the company in 2008, stepped down as CEO in February and moved into the vice chairman role. Albinder Singh Dhindsa, founder of Blinkit, has taken over as Eternal’s CEO.
In his letter, Goyal argued that Eternal's true competitive advantage lies not in algorithms or capital, but in the unpredictable physical world it has learned to operate in.
"Every order on Zomato is a real-world coordination problem," he wrote, describing how a meal must be prepared by an independent restaurant, picked up by a delivery partner navigating live traffic, and delivered while still hot.
He said Blinkit takes this complexity further, with the company running its own supply chain across 17 million square feet of warehousing and dark store space, where the margin for error is measured in seconds and centimetres of shelf space.
"Our systems interact with the real India - cities where addresses are approximate, road infrastructure is always catching up, supply chains that still run largely on cash and handshake relationships, a workforce that is largely informal, and a merchant ecosystem that is fragmented in ways that would be unrecognisable to most global tech companies," the founder wrote.
Goyal said the physical world doesn't always cooperate, as weather shuts roads, demand spikes without warning, and restaurants run out of ingredients during rush hour. But said India's structural complexity is the company's moat, not a hurdle.
