The Canteen That Became a Company
In 2008, Deepinder Goyal was doing what millions of analysts do: waiting in long lines at the Bain & Company canteen in Delhi, spending 20 minutes on a lunch break just to figure out what was available. His solution was a weekend project — he scanned the canteen menus and put them online.
Traffic from his own colleagues suggested something bigger. He and co-founder Pankaj Chaddah registered FoodieBay.com, started digitising restaurant menus across Delhi, and within a year had the city's most comprehensive restaurant directory.
What made FoodieBay different from every other restaurant aggregator of the era — Yellow Pages, JustDial — was Goyal's obsession with accurate, updated information. Menus were photographed, not typed. Hours were verified. Photos were real, not stock images. The product was built on a trust loop that has remained Zomato's core competitive advantage for 18 years.
The IPO and The Acquisition
By 2010, FoodieBay had become Zomato. The name change signalled ambition. Over the next decade, Goyal raised over $2B, expanded to 24 countries, navigated the chaos of COVID (which nearly killed food delivery), and emerged as one of India's most strategically clear-headed founders.
The July 2021 IPO was India's defining consumer internet moment. Zomato listed at a valuation north of $8B and began the journey toward profitability that most analysts said was impossible. Within four quarters of the IPO, Zomato posted its first profitable quarter.
The 2022 acquisition of Blinkit (formerly Grofers) for ~$568M was Goyal's most controversial decision — and his most important. At the time, quick commerce was burning cash at a ferocious rate. Most investors wanted Zomato to focus on its core. Goyal was convinced that grocery delivery in 10 minutes would be Zomato's most defensible business within five years. He was right.
Eternal: The Next Chapter
The January 2025 rebrand from Zomato Ltd to Eternal wasn't cosmetic. It was a structural acknowledgment that Deepinder Goyal's ambitions have outgrown the restaurant-delivery category entirely.
Blinkit now operates over 1,000 dark stores and is on track to become India's largest quick commerce platform. Hyperpure supplies fresh produce and ingredients to tens of thousands of restaurants. District is building the infrastructure for India's live events economy.
At $25B+ valuation, Eternal is India's most valuable consumer internet company — and Goyal remains its most visible, most polarising, and most underestimated founder. He started by solving a lunch queue problem. He ended up building the infrastructure layer for how urban India eats, shops, and entertains itself.
The lesson isn't about scale. It's about the conviction to keep expanding the definition of the problem you're solving.