Zomato elevates Mohit Gupta as its co-founder

Zomato has elevated Mohit Gupta, CEO of food delivery unit, as its co-founder. Last year, the foodtech unicorn had also given its COO Gaurav Gupta a position in the co-founding team. Mohit Gupta has become the fourth co-founder of the Gurugram-based venture.

Announcing the new co-founder in the company, Deepinder Goyal, CEO of Zomato, has reminded all employees about the Founders Program, which was announced a year ago. Gaurav Gupta became the co-founder under the program.

Mohit joined Zomato about two years ago after a decade-long stint at India’s largest online travel agency. He was a chief operating officer (COO) at CTrip-backed public company.

Mohit has been handling the food delivery business of Zomato since July 2018. Under his leadership, the company has scaled up to about 40 million monthly order volume. His elevation as a co-founder has come at a time when online food ordering volume is down because of Covid-19 pandemic.

Entrackr has sent queries to Zomato for confirmation. We will update the story as and when it responds.

To open up new monetisation channels, the company had begun grocery delivery service Zomato Market and recently ventured into home delivery of alcohol.

For the sake of extending the runway and cutting expenses, Zomato announced to lay off 13% of its workforce or over 500 employees. Employees at the foodtech firm also took voluntary pay cuts by the senior management. Gupta was also one of the contributors to the voluntary salary cut scheme.

In a bid to beef up its grocery vertical, Zomato was also in early talks to acquire SoftBank-backed e-grocer Grofers. However, the conversations seem to have not progressed into an advanced stage.

The trend of elevating senior executives a co-founder is rare in India. Bytedance-backed DailyHunt had promoted former Facebook India’s managing director Umang Bedi as co-founder after a short stint as President. Last year, Ananth Narayanan, former CEO of Myntra, had joined Medlife as its co-founder and CEO. Most recently, Rahul Jaimini, Swiggy's co-founder, joined edtech firm Pesto as a co-founder.