Zepto elevates Nikhil Mittal as Chief Technology Officer

Nikhil Mittal, CTO, Zepto

Zepto, the quick-commerce unicorn, has promoted Nikhil Mittal from Senior Vice President (SVP) of Engineering to Chief Technology Officer (CTO), the company said in a press release on January 24. Mittal was Zepto’s first employee and has been with the startup since its early days in February 2021, as per his LinkedIn profile.

In his new role, Mittal will report to co-founder Kaivalya Vohra. Along with Mittal, the Analytics and Data Science team and Chief Product Officer Ankit Agarwal will all report to Vohra, who was also the CTO before Mittal’s promotion.

“In an unbelievably short period of time and with frugality, Nikhil has built out a high performing engineering team from scratch and, more importantly, scaled himself to be an exceptional leader,” said co-founder Vohra.

Vohra along with Aadit Palicha founded Zepto as KiranaKart during the pandemic in 2020.

“I joined Zepto on Day 1 and had the privilege of seeing this company scale from 0 to thousands of crores…it still feels like Day 1,” Mittal said.

Zepto had made other appointments and strengthened its top deck last year ahead of a planned IPO. In September 2023, Ankit Agarwal was made the CPO from SVP of Product. Before that, in May 2023, Viral Jhaveri was announced as Zepto's Chief Growth Officer after being the company's Chief Business Officer (CBO) for nearly two years.

Similarly, Vinay Dhanani, formerly the COO, was elevated to be President - supply chain category. Dhanani's earlier position as COO was then filled by Vikas Sharma, who joined the quick-commerce company as the lead of central and city operations.

Mumbai-based Zepto was the first unicorn to be minted from India in 2o23. It competes with Zomato-owned Blinkit, Swiggy Instamart, Reliance-funded Dunzo and Tata’s BigBasket (BB Now).

Over the years, it has raised closed to $600 million from Nexus VP, Goodwater Capital, the StepStone Group, Y Combinator and several others and was last valued at $1.4 billion.