Introduction
There is a particular kind of investor who looks at a loss-making company and walks away immediately.
I can understand that instinct. Losses are uncomfortable for many investors (myself included).
But we must also understand this: the greatest wealth-creation story in the history of the stock market is Amazon. It remained a loss-making company for nearly two decades.
The investors who understood why Amazon was choosing not to show profits made generational returns. The ones who did not missed the opportunity of compounding.
I have been reviewing a few new-age tech IPOs that have listed on Indian exchanges since 2021.
There are about ~850+ of them, out of which 52 caught my attention. Out of those 52, I have identified 10 companies that share a structural resemblance to Amazon’s early growth playbook.
Maybe these companies are not like Amazon in terms of scale for now. I think that comparison would be unfair and premature.
But in terms of the strategic logic, they are operating like what Amazon did between 1995 and 2015. Why I say so? Because of the following reasons:
- These are companies that are deliberately sacrificing short-term profitability to capture long-term market dominance.
- They are spending aggressively today because they believe that the market they are trying to win is enormous. The logic is that the company that captures it first will find it very difficult to dislodge later.
These are the exact things that Amazon did in its early years.
And it is exactly what these 10 companies are attempting to do in India.
Before We Begin
Before I take you through each company, I want to establish one mental model that will run through this entire article.
It is the concept of the “reinvestment flywheel.”
Amazon did not become Amazon by making profits.
It became Amazon by taking every dollar it earned and putting it immediately back into the business: into logistics, technology, products, geographies, etc.
- The more it reinvested, the better its service got.
- The better its service got, the more customers it attracted.
- The more customers it attracted, the more revenue it generated.
- And the more revenue it generated, the more it could reinvest.
This is the flywheel.
Once it starts spinning, it is very hard to stop. It is also very hard for a competitor to build an equally fast-spinning one.
The 10 companies I am going to talk about are all, in their own way, trying to build a flywheel.
Some of them are further along than others. Some of them will succeed. Some of them may not.
My job in this article is not to tell you which ones to buy. It is to help you understand how to think about them.
The idea is this: when you actually start reading their annual reports, you have this perspective in your mind that you cannot look only at their profit numbers.
1. Zomato (Eternal)
| SL | 1 |
| Category | Platform / Marketplace |
| Company Name | Zomato (Eternal) |
| Category | Mainline |
| Listing Date | 23-Jul-21 |
| Issue Price | 76 |
| Total Subs | 38.25x |
| Issue Size (Rs. Cr.) | 9,375 |
| Years Since Listing | 4.81 |
| CAGR as of Date | 16.32% |
Let me start with the one company on this list that has already proven something.
When Zomato was listed in July 2021 at Rs. 76, it had no profit. The P/E ratio was incalculable.
Analysts who relied on traditional valuation metrics had no method to value it. Hence, many dismissed it as a speculative bet.
Yet here we are, roughly four and a half years later, and the stock has delivered a 16.32% CAGR since listing. It is a respectable return for any investment. Zomato was widely considered a gamble at the time, but now it is starting to show some growth (in the traditional sense as well).
But I think the more interesting story is not the stock price. It is what has happened to the business underneath.
- Zomato began as a restaurant discovery and food delivery platform. That was the original value proposition: you open the app, you find a restaurant, you order food, and someone delivers it.
- But what Zomato has been quietly building, using the cash flows from that core business, is something much larger.
Today, Zomato operates Blinkit, its quick commerce arm that delivers groceries and essentials in 10 minutes. Blinkit is now growing faster than the core food delivery business.
It is also expanding its district network, the dark stores from which Blinkit operates, at an aggressive pace across tier-1 and tier-2 cities.
The company is also investing in Hyperpure, which is its B2B ingredient supply business that sells directly to restaurants.
And it has Zomato District, its events and experiences platform.
What you are seeing here is the Zomato flywheel in action.
Food delivery generated cash. That cash funded Blinkit. Blinkit is now growing fast enough to potentially become a bigger business than food delivery itself.
The core business and the adjacencies are feeding each other.
- More delivery partners mean faster delivery times.
- Faster delivery times mean higher customer satisfaction.
- Higher customer satisfaction means more orders.
- More orders mean more revenue to reinvest.
The company rebranded itself as Eternal in 2025. It is a signal that management sees this as a long-duration, multi-decade business, not a single-product platform.
Whether that ambition is justified will be proven over time. But the operational progress so far suggests that the flywheel is indeed spinning.
The risk with Zomato is not the business model; it is the valuation. At current prices, the market is already pricing in a great deal of future growth.
The question every investor needs to answer is: at what price does a great business become a bad investment? That is the discipline required here.
2. Swiggy
| SL | 2 |
| Category | Platform / Marketplace |
| Company Name | Swiggy |
| Category | Mainline |
| Listing Date | 13-Nov-24 |
| Issue Price | 390 |
| Total Subs | 3.59x |
| LTP (Rs.) | 253.7 |
| Issue Size (Rs. Cr.) | 11,327.43 |
| Years Since Listing | 1.5 |
| CAGR as of Date | -28.56% |
Swiggy’s stock performance since listing has been painful to watch.
It is down nearly 40% from its issue price. And I can already hear some of you saying, if Zomato is the Amazon story, isn’t Swiggy just the Flipkart story? The one that loses?
Not necessarily. And here is why.
The food delivery market in India is not a winner-take-all market. It is, and is likely to remain, a two-player market. Why? Because a duopoly creates better dynamics for both players than a monopoly would.
If only Zomato existed, restaurants would have no negotiating power. Delivery partners would have no alternatives. Customers would have no competitive pressure, forcing the platform to improve.
The existence of Swiggy actually makes both platforms better.
More importantly, Swiggy has something that Zomato did not have at the time of its IPO: the knowledge of exactly how the quick commerce model works.
Swiggy launched Instamart, watching Blinkit’s progress. That is a genuine advantage.
Being second to market, when you are learning from the leader’s mistakes, is not always a disadvantage.
The current stock weakness has two explanations.
- First, Swiggy’s unit economics in quick commerce are not yet at the same level of maturity as Blinkit. The dark store network is still being built. The contribution margins are negative in several markets. This is entirely expected at this stage. It is the same Amazon logic of investing aggressively today for tomorrow’s profits.
- Second, the IPO was priced aggressively. When sentiment shifts, aggressively-priced IPOs correct the most.
What I am watching for with Swiggy is the trajectory of Instamart’s contribution margins over the next 6 to 8 quarters.
If those margins improve quarter-on-quarter, even if they remain negative, it tells you that the unit economics are moving in the right direction.
3. Meesho
| SL | 3 |
| Category | Platform / Marketplace |
| Company Name | Meesho |
| Category | Mainline |
| Listing Date | 10-Dec-25 |
| Issue Price | 111 |
| Total Subs | 79.03x |
| LTP (Rs.) | 191.5 |
| Issue Size (Rs. Cr.) | 5,421 |
| Years Since Listing | 0.42 |
| CAGR as of Date | 17.85% |
If there is one company on this list that most closely mirrors Amazon’s original core thesis, it is Meesho. Why? Because it is reaching the customer that nobody else is reaching.
Amazon’s early insight was simple: millions of people in small-town America cannot access a wide variety of products.
The nearest bookstore might be 50 miles away. The nearest electronics store might carry only 20 SKUs.
Amazon gave those customers access to everything. That was the value proposition.
Meesho is doing something structurally similar for the next 500 million internet users in India. These are customers in tier-2, tier-3, and tier-4 cities and towns. They are price-sensitive in a way that metro users are not.
They shop primarily in vernacular languages. They are comfortable on WhatsApp, but navigating a sophisticated e-commerce app might be a friction point. And most importantly, they are underserved by every existing e-commerce platform.
Meesho’s model is built specifically for this audience.
The product catalogue focuses heavily on unbranded, value-priced goods. These are those things that this demographic actually buys.
The interface is simple. The vernacular support is strong. And the logistics network, which is a joint effort with external partners, has been expanding aggressively into pin codes that Amazon India and Flipkart largely ignore.
The recent listing is too early to draw definitive conclusions.
But the market that Meesho is addressing is genuinely large.
- India has approximately 800 million internet users.
- The top 100 to 150 million are reasonably well-served by existing platforms.
- The next 650 million are not.
- Meesho’s entire strategy is aimed at those 650 million people.
The Amazon analogy here is particularly apt because Amazon, too, started with a segment that looked unglamorous — used books sold online.
Nobody thought that was a scalable business at the time. But Amazon understood something important: the logistics and trust infrastructure you build to sell books is the same infrastructure you need to sell everything else.
Meesho is building the same foundational layer for those 650 million customers.
What they do on top of it over the next decade is the interesting question.
4. BlackBuck
| SL | 4 |
| Category | Logistics Tech |
| Company Name | BlackBuck |
| Category | Mainline |
| Listing Date | 21-Nov-24 |
| Issue Price | 273 |
| Total Subs | 1.86x |
| LTP (Rs.) | 533.5 |
| Issue Size (Rs. Cr.) | 1,115 |
| Years Since Listing | 1.48 |
| CAGR as of Date | 54.40% |
BlackBuck is a name that many retail investors are not familiar with. And that is actually part of why it is interesting.
India moves approximately 75% of its goods by road.
The trucking industry has an estimated market size of over Rs. 10 lakh crore annually. And yet, until very recently, this industry was almost entirely unorganized.
A shipper who needed a truck would call a broker. The broker would call another broker. Somewhere down the chain, a truck driver would be found. The whole process from pricing to delivery looked quite opaque.
BlackBuck is building the technology layer that sits on top of this existing industry.
We can imagine it as the Amazon Marketplace for Indian trucking.
- It is a platform where shippers can post loads,
- Truck operators can find freight,
- Where the entire transaction, including payments, documentation, and tracking, happens digitally.
What makes this particularly interesting is the network effect dynamics. How?
- Every additional truck operator who joins the platform makes it more valuable for shippers because there is more capacity to choose from.
- Every additional shipper who joins makes it more valuable for truck operators because there is more freight to bid on.
This is the classic two-sided marketplace flywheel.
Once this business reaches a certain scale, it becomes extremely difficult to displace.
The company has also layered financial services on top of the core marketplace.
- BlackBuck’s FASTag business, which manages toll payments for truck operators, generates a recurring revenue stream that is largely passive.
- The lending and insurance products that sit on top of the transaction data, BlackBuck can see exactly how much each truck is earning, how frequently it operates, and what routes it takes. This gives it a risk-underwriting advantage that no traditional lender can match.
The CAGR of 54.40% since its listing in November 2024 suggests that the market is beginning to recognize this story.
But the real test is whether the platform can maintain its competitive advantage as the trucking industry becomes more organized and as competitors, both domestic and potentially from the logistics arms of larger conglomerates, begin to build competing platforms.
5. Shadowfax Technologies
| SL | 5 |
| Category | Logistics Tech |
| Company Name | Shadowfax Technologies |
| Category | Mainline |
| Listing Date | 28-Jan-26 |
| Issue Price | 124 |
| Total Subs | 2.72x |
| LTP (Rs.) | 168.11 |
| Issue Size (Rs. Cr.) | 1,907 |
| Years Since Listing | 0.29 |
| CAGR as of Date | 49.30% |
Every e-commerce company in India has the same problem.
- The first mile, picking up a product from a warehouse, is manageable.
- The last mile, delivering it to a specific address in a tier-3 city at a specific time, is where cost, complexity, and failure rates explode.
Shadowfax is a third-party logistics company that has built its entire business model around this last-mile problem.
But the more interesting thing about Shadowfax is not just that it does last-mile delivery, it is how it has structured its network.
Rather than owning a large fleet of vehicles and employing thousands of delivery partners, Shadowfax operates as a gig-economy-style network.
- Delivery partners are independent contractors who use the Shadowfax app to pick up and deliver shipments.
- This asset-light model means that Shadowfax can scale up and down based on demand without carrying the fixed cost of a large permanent workforce.
The comparison to Amazon’s early logistics strategy is instructive. Amazon initially relied entirely on third-party carriers like FedEx and UPS. Over time, as its volume grew, it began building its own logistics network (Amazon Logistics). Now, it is one of the largest parcel carriers in the United States.
Shadowfax is at an earlier stage of a similar journey.
The question is whether, as Indian e-commerce volumes grow, Shadowfax can use its platform and data advantages to become an indispensable partner to the e-commerce ecosystem. Also, we have to see what happens when the large platforms eventually build this capability in-house.
The early listing performance is encouraging. The business is growing. And the problem it is solving, affordable, reliable last-mile delivery at scale, is the moat that it must hold on to.
6. Billionbrains Garage Ventures (Groww)
| SL | 6 |
| Category | Fintech |
| Company Name | Billionbrains Garage Ventures (Groww) |
| Category | Mainline |
| Listing Date | 12-Nov-25 |
| Issue Price | 100 |
| Total Subs | 17.6x |
| LTP (Rs.) | 188.8 |
| Issue Size (Rs. Cr.) | 6,632 |
| Years Since Listing | 0.5 |
| CAGR as of Date | 68.57% |
Groww is trying to make investing as easy as shopping. This is its focus.
When Groww launched in 2016, the dominant platforms for investing in India were clunky.
- They were designed more for financial advisors than for individual investors.
- Opening a demat account required physical paperwork.
- Buying a mutual fund required visiting a distributor.
- The entire experience was designed for an era when investing was considered an activity for the financially sophisticated.
Apps like Groww changed the way people used to invest before they came into existence.
The app is clean and intuitive.
With the advent of the internet and the digital revolution in India, onboarding of clients on these apps became quicker. The investment process itself took minutes.
Their target audience was precisely the young, digitally-native, first-time investor who had never bought a mutual fund before and who would never have walked into a broker’s office.
The Amazon analogy here is about democratization.
Amazon democratized shopping. Groww is democratizing investing.
And just as Amazon’s early customers were not the wealthy who already had access to everything, Groww’s early customers were not the HNIs who were already invested.
They were the 30-crore Indians who had a bank account and a phone but had never invested in capital markets before.
The platform has since expanded well beyond mutual funds. Stocks, US equities, gold, fixed deposits.
Groww is building towards a comprehensive financial super app.
And the data moat it is building is significant.
Every transaction, every SIP, every portfolio rebalancing decision leaves a data trail that Groww can use to build better products, offer more relevant advice, and eventually cross-sell financial services.
The risk is competition.
- Zerodha, Angel One, HDFC Securities, and others are all fighting for the same customer.
- Regulatory changes, the SEBI-mandated fee restructuring in 2024, impacted the economics of the entire discount broking industry. It creates additional uncertainty.
But Groww’s brand equity among young investors and its scale of customer acquisition give it a durable starting point.
7. LE Travenues Technology (IXIGO)
| SL | 7 |
| Category | Travel Tech |
| Company Name | LE Travenues Technology (IXIGO) |
| Category | Mainline |
| Listing Date | 18-Jun-24 |
| Issue Price | 93 |
| Total Subs | 98.34x |
| LTP (Rs.) | 163.9 |
| Issue Size (Rs. Cr.) | 740 |
| Years Since Listing | 1.9 |
| CAGR as of Date | 9.41% |
IXIGO is an interesting case because it occupies a niche that its larger competitors like MakeMyTrip, Goibibo, Yatra largely ignore.
The Indian travel market is conventionally thought of as flights, hotels, and holiday packages, right?
That is the market that MakeMyTrip and Goibibo serve.
But there is a much larger, and in some ways more structurally interesting, travel market underneath that one. The market for train and bus tickets is particularly strong among non-metro travellers.
India has approximately 23 million people travelling by train every single day. A significant proportion of these travellers do not book through any platform. They queue at railway stations, or they use IRCTC’s own website, which is notoriously difficult to use.
IXIGO built a layer on top of IRCTC that made train ticket booking significantly easier, and in doing so, captured a loyal user base in tier-2 and tier-3 cities.
This is that layer of service that the premium travel platforms had not bothered to address.
The Amazon parallel here is the same as Meesho’s. Both companies are addressing the next 300 to 400 million internet users, not the top 100 million.
And just as Amazon’s early success with books gave it the platform from which to launch everything else, IXIGO’s dominance in train bookings gives it a platform from which to expand into other travel categories like buses, cabs, and hotels.
This is being done by IXIGO for a genuinely underserved customer segment.
The challenge for IXIGO is how it can grow beyond the core train ticketing business, where margins are inherently thin because IRCTC controls the inventory.
8. Urban Company — The Home Services Marketplace
| SL | 8 |
| Category | Platform / Marketplace |
| Company Name | Urban Company |
| Category | Mainline |
| Listing Date | 17-Sep-25 |
| Issue Price | 103 |
| Total Subs | 103.63x |
| LTP (Rs.) | 126.25 |
| Issue Size (Rs. Cr.) | 1,900 |
| Years Since Listing | 0.65 |
| CAGR as of Date | -22.19% |
I think Urban Company is attempting something genuinely difficult.
It is trying to bring trust and technology to the home services market.
It is building a marketplace for plumbers, electricians, beauty professionals, AC repair technicians, deep cleaning specialists, etc.
This is the market that has historically been hyperlocal and built entirely on personal referrals.
The problem Urban Company is solving is not just convenience; it is trust. How? Because when you call a plumber you found on a random website, you have no idea whether they will show up on time, whether they will charge fairly, whether the work will be done properly, and whether your home will be safe. Urban Company addresses these concerns through standardized training for service professionals, upfront pricing, a background verification system, and a rating mechanism that creates accountability.
So people who are using Urban Company are not using it because he/she trusts a plumber or an electrician, they trust Urban Company.
This is structurally similar to what Airbnb did for accommodation or what Uber did for cab rides.
They took an informal, opaque market and added a technology layer that introduced transparency, standardization, and trust.
And just like Airbnb and Uber, the platform benefits from network effects on both sides.
More service professionals on the platform means more availability for customers. More customers on the platform mean more income for service professionals, which attracts more of them.
The home services market is extraordinarily fragmented. Building trust and standardization across dozens of service categories, in hundreds of cities, with thousands of service professionals, takes time and money.
The path to profitability requires scale that the company has not yet fully achieved.
But I think the long-term prize for Urban Company is enormous.
9. Pine Labs — The Payments Infrastructure Play
| SL | 9 |
| Category | Fintech |
| Company Name | Pine Labs Ltd. |
| Category | Mainline |
| Listing Date | 14-Nov-25 |
| Issue Price | 221 |
| Total Subs | 2.46x |
| LTP (Rs.) | 165 |
| Issue Size (Rs. Cr.) | 3,900 |
| Years Since Listing | 0.5 |
| CAGR as of Date | -31.82% |
Pine Labs is not a consumer-facing brand. Most people have never heard of it.
But if you have ever swiped or tapped your card for payment during a purchase, there is a reasonable chance that the transaction went through Pine Labs infrastructure.
Pine Labs is a merchant commerce platform. It provides the payment terminals, the software, and the transaction processing infrastructure that retailers use to accept digital payments.
It also provides a range of value-added services, EMI processing, loyalty programme management, credit at point of sale, that sit on top of the core payments infrastructure.
The Amazon analogy for Pine Labs is AWS (Amazon Web Services). AWS is the infrastructure layer that thousands of businesses run on.
Pine Labs has a similar dynamic.
Once a large retail chain deploys Pine Labs terminals across its stores and integrates Pine Labs software into its billing systems, switching to a competitor is expensive and disruptive. This creates a sticky, recurring revenue stream with high customer retention.
The risk that companies like Pine Labs are facing is UPI.
UPI has disrupted the traditional POS business. The growth in QR code-based payments reduces the need for physical terminals. Pine Labs is navigating this transition by expanding into software and value-added services, but the transition is creating near-term revenue uncertainty.
10. Lenskart Solutions — The Omnichannel Retail Innovator
| SL | 10 |
| Category | Platform / Marketplace |
| Company Name | Lenskart Solutions |
| Category | Mainline |
| Listing Date | 10-Nov-25 |
| Issue Price | 402 |
| Total Subs | 17.6x |
| LTP (Rs.) | 478.1 |
| Issue Size (Rs. Cr.) | 7,279 |
| Years Since Listing | 0.51 |
| CAGR as of Date | 21.04% |
I think Lenskart is the most unusual name on this list. Why?
Because it is not a pure tech platform. It sells eyewear. Glasses. Spectacles. And yet, it belongs here because of the way it has completely reimagined how to shape a retail business using technology.
Lenskart’s Amazon parallel is in the integration of online and offline.
- Amazon started online, expanded into physical stores through Whole Foods, and Amazon Go.
- Lenskart started online and has now built a network of over 2,000 physical stores across India and international markets.
But unlike traditional optical retailers, every Lenskart store is connected to the same data infrastructure.
- Customer prescriptions,
- Purchase history, and
- Preferences are all stored digitally.
A customer who walks into a store in Mumbai can have their data pulled up instantly, even if they originally bought their glasses from the Lenskart website.
The company has also invested heavily in manufacturing technology.
It has built its own lens manufacturing facility in India.
This vertical integration is another Amazon-like move:
- Control the supply chain,
- Reduce costs,
- Improve the customer experience, and
- Build a moat that is difficult for competitors to replicate.
Associated Risks
What could go wrong with these businesses?
These are not safe, boring investments.
They are early-stage, high-growth businesses operating in competitive markets. Here is what keeps me cautious.
- The first risk is execution. Every one of these companies is trying to do something very hard. Building a flywheel takes time. They will need capital to survive and a management team that has grit and capability. Many companies that attempt the same things have already failed.
- The second risk is valuation. Several of these companies are priced for future cash flows that are not visible today. When you pay 15x or 20x revenue for a business, you are making a strong bet about what that business will look like 5 to 10 years from now. This bet can easily go wrong.
- The third risk is regulation. Several of these companies (fintech and data-driven ones) operate in spaces where regulatory frameworks are still evolving. A sudden regulatory change can alter the economics of a business overnight.
- The fourth risk is competition. The most successful platforms attract the most competitive responses. When Blinkit started gaining traction, Swiggy launched Instamart. When Groww started growing, every major bank launched a competing investment app.
Conclusion
I want to end this post with a framework.
These are not stocks you buy and check every quarter, hoping for profit. These are businesses you buy because you believe in a 5 to 10-year thesis.
The metric you should be watching for each of these companies is not profit. It is the quality of the reinvestment.
- Are they spending money on things that will make the platform stickier, faster, or more useful?
- Are customer retention rates improving?
- Is the cost of acquiring a new customer falling over time?
- Is the average revenue per user growing?
These are the signals that tell you whether the flywheel is spinning in the right direction.
Amazon spent 20 years not showing a profit.
But throughout those 20 years, the underlying metrics of customer growth, order frequency, Prime membership, and AWS revenue were all moving up.
Have a happy investing.
Disclaimer: This article is for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute financial advice. Please conduct your own research and consult a qualified financial advisor before making any investment decisions.
