The 41-year-old Goyal, who studied Mathematics and Computing at IIT Delhi, owns about 36.95 crore shares in Zomato. The new-age stock zoomed over 4% in Monday’s session, on the back of an increase in platform fee, to a fresh all-time high of Rs 232. The stock’s market capitalisation also crossed Rs 2 lakh crore mark.
His stake alone in Zomato is now worth about Rs 8,400 crore, making him a billionaire in US dollar terms.
Once ridiculed as a loss-making startup burning cash raised from VCs, Zomato has been a turnaround story ever since it reported its first-ever profit of Rs 2 crore in Q1 of FY24.
Zomato’s quick commerce arm Blinkit turned adjusted EBITDA positive in March.
In Q4 of FY24, the firm delivered a consolidated net profit of Rs 175 crore after which brokerages raised target prices.
Discover the stories of your interest
Analysts were impressed again with the growth in Blinkit as the quick commerce platform’s GOV grew by a solid 13.7% QoQ driven by a 17% QoQ in orders offset by a 3% QoQ decline in AOV. The announcement to increase the dark stores count to 1,000 by the end of FY25 from 525 in Q4 marked a significant reset in expectations and positioning within the quick commerce for Blinkit.Goyal’s journey into the startup world began when he was working as a management consultant with Bain & Company and realized how people have to stand in line every day in the pantry to look for menus to order food.
The problem inspired him to start Foodiebay.com, which later on became Zomato.
Goyal had recently revealed that when he started Zomato 16 years ago, his father told him – “jaanta hain tera baap kaun hain” as he came from a small town in Punjab. He added that his father thought he would never be able to pull off a start-up given their “humble background”.