India's instant gratification — the three waves

In 2014 we launched one of the first end-to-end delivery platforms in the country. The thesis was simple and slightly daft: the curated half of Mumbai's eating-out was not online, and the customer who could afford it would pay for both quality and operational discipline. The brand was called Scootsy. Swiggy acquired it in August 2018.

What we did not realise at the time was that we were in the first wave of something much larger. Indian instant gratification has moved through three of them — and where the third is taking shape now is the most consequential, hardest to build, and the one our industry is least prepared for.

Wave 1 — premium delivery, 2012 to 2018

The first wave actually began before most people remember it. Foodpanda entered India in 2012 — the earliest at-scale food delivery platform in the market. But Foodpanda was a pure aggregator. The restaurants did their own deliveries, the platform just took the order, and the model was hard-locked to hyperlocal listings. That worked for pizza chains and the corner-of-the-street takeaway. It did not work for the kind of curated restaurant experience the metro consumer had started to expect.

Swiggy was founded in August 2014 by Sriharsha Majety, Nandan Reddy and Rahul Jaimini, betting on owned last-mile delivery rather than the marketplace model.

Scootsy launched the same year. We started by acquiring Meals on Wheels — India's first end-to-end food delivery company — and built the full stack from order to doorstep. The bet was that Mumbai's premium audience would pay for both quality and operational discipline. What ended up shipping was a set of firsts that, in hindsight, became the architecture every wave since has rebuilt: India's first long-distance restaurant delivery (taking Bandra restaurants to South Mumbai and back, in a city that had until then accepted "out of delivery range" as a sentence); the first scheduled-for-later orders (eight that evening, not "as soon as possible"); the first platform-owned dark store powering an SOS twenty-minute service for emergency-buy items; and the first curated premium-brand network — Yauatcha, Hakkasan, Indigo Delicatessen, FoodHall, the KA Hospitality outlets. The signature SLA was sixty minutes, hit ninety-eight percent of the time.

The economics of the premium-on-demand category did not survive long. Foodpanda was acquired by Ola in late 2017 and effectively shut down by mid-2019. Scootsy folded into Swiggy in August 2018, contributing its dark-store, long-distance and scheduled-delivery muscle to Swiggy's own logistics layer. The premium-on-demand category was eaten by the volume-led platforms that came up around it.

What ended the wave, looking back, was not failure. It was normalisation. Sixty-minute delivery from a serious restaurant stopped being a small miracle and started being the floor of customer expectation. The next platform had to promise something faster, or stop selling itself on speed. The twenty-minute dark store, when it came back at scale a decade later as Wave 2, was running on the same architecture we had shipped in Mumbai.

Wave 2 — quick commerce, 2021 to 2026

The second wave began in 2021 with two Stanford dropouts in their early twenties. Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra launched Zepto out of a small Mumbai office, dropped the original name KiranaKart, and made the only promise that mattered: ten minutes.

The architecture was different. Not restaurants but groceries, and not a logistics layer on top of existing supply but a network of dark stores stocked to maximise the ten-minute promise. Blinkit (formerly Grofers, acquired by Zomato in 2022) became the category leader at roughly forty-four to fifty percent market share. Swiggy Instamart entered in August 2020 from the Swiggy stable and now runs over a thousand dark stores across 127 cities. BB Now and Reliance's variants followed. The Indian Q-commerce market crossed ₹64,000 crore in FY25 and is projected to triple to ₹2 lakh crore by FY28.

Two things made Wave 2 distinct. The first was vertical expansion — by 2025 you could order groceries, pharmacy, electronics, beauty, pet food, even toys in ten minutes. The second was the cash. The top three players collectively burned approximately ₹9,000 crore across a single year of expansion in 2025, and still sit on roughly ₹40,000 crore in cash. Blinkit's CEO Albinder Dhindsa publicly warned, in December 2025, that the bubble was "close to bursting."

Some of the experiments are already retreating. Zepto Cafe — the ten-minute hot food extension — paused operations in roughly two hundred stores in November 2025 citing supply and staff issues. That pullback matters. It is the first edge of the limit on what dark stores can do for categories that need humans, not pallets.

Wave 3 — the human-on-demand economy

The third wave starts where Wave 2 stops. Goods can be dark-stored. Humans cannot.

The earliest at-scale proof point is Urban Company, which IPO'd on 17 September 2025, raised ₹1,900 crore, and was oversubscribed 108 times — the most-subscribed Indian IPO of the year. The company runs around 54,000 monthly active service partners across India, the UAE, Singapore and Saudi Arabia. Most of them deliver beauty, repair and cleaning services in homes. Crucially, the company is profitable — FY25 net profit of ₹239.8 crore.

That is what investable human-on-demand looks like at scale. The arithmetic, in plain terms, is that human service economics are harder than dark-store economics but, when they work, far more durable.

The categories now emerging around Urban Company are messy and fragmented. ChefKart, COOX, BookMyChef and Take a Chef are racing to build the "send me a chef for dinner" market — BookMyChef claims 1,200+ verified private chefs, caterers, bartenders and waiters across the top seven metros. Rapido crossed ₹1,000 crore in revenue in FY25 and now operates with nine million captains and 1.5 million daily rides — the drivers-on-demand tier of Wave 3.

The most aggressive new entrants — Snabbit and Pronto — push the promise further still. On-demand household help, cleaners, handymen, even cooks delivered to your door in ten to fifteen minutes. The technology works. The economics, when they work, are great. But the geography is brutal. Open either app outside their tightly-drawn "micro-market" catchments — a handful of pin codes in Mumbai or Bangalore where they have pre-positioned the supply — and you see the same apologetic message: "no service providers available at this time."

And yet the funding is still flowing. Both Snabbit and Pronto have closed early-stage rounds at valuations that read like 2021 Q-commerce flashbacks. The investor thesis is straightforward: whoever cracks ten-minute services at meaningful scale captures a multi-billion-rupee category, and everyone else either gets acquired into the winner or absorbed into its logistics layer.

The problem with the thesis is that the same logic underwrote Wave 2. The top three players burned approximately ₹9,000 crore across a single year of 2025 to teach Indian consumers that ten minutes is the right answer. The investors writing those cheques are, by and large, the same investors now writing cheques into Wave 3. The most likely outcome — and not the only one, but the most likely — is a multi-year race to the bottom on commissions, payouts and unit economics that ends with two or three survivors and a generation of capital incinerated in the process. The micro-market message is the early warning sign. The funding round is the lagging indicator.

That is the entire structural problem of Wave 3 in one line. Humans cannot be dark-stored. They have to live within delivery radius, be available within the hour, be willing to take the dispatch — and be paid enough that the inconvenience of being summoned is worth it.

This is the space where Kaam Hire plays. The brigade we curate — bartenders, banquet captains, party cooks, sommeliers, hostesses — already exists across India's hotels and restaurants, working evening shifts inside establishments. Wave 3 is the platform that summons them to a Saturday party at a private home, an event in a banquet hall, a corporate dinner. Pre-vetted, geo-tagged, rated, and dispatched within a radius — but never confused with a delivery rider, and never operating in a micro-market where the supply isn't real.

"You cannot dark-store a human. A bartender has a name, a Saturday, a child at home, a preferred neighbourhoodand a price for the inconvenience of being summoned. That is the entire reason Wave 3 will be harder, slower and more lucrative than the wave before it."

What this means for consumption

A consumer who can host a Saturday dinner with a hired chef, a bartender, a bar setup and dessert delivered to the door is a consumer who walks into restaurants less often. The compound effect on metro dining-out is real. Restaurants will not disappear — they will become more event-led, more occasion-led, more experiential. The mid-tier neighbourhood casual will be the hardest hit. The premium destination restaurant and the celebratory chef's-counter will be the most defended.

The same instant-services consumer is also a different category of spender. A bartender for one Saturday evening costs ₹2,000 to ₹5,000 plus mixers, glassware rental and a small platform fee. A chef-led dinner for ten can run ₹15,000 to ₹40,000. These are not pizza-order tickets. They are wedding-economy adjacencies — a per-event spend that is closer to a small catering bill than to anything Wave 2 trained the customer to expect.

What it means for employment

This is the more interesting half of the story. Wave 2's gig labour is delivery riders — high volume, low skill, ₹600 to ₹800 a day on a long shift. Wave 3's gig labour is structurally different: bartenders, cooks, captains, hostesses earning ₹2,000 to ₹5,000 for a single evening of work, on top of their day jobs in hospitality establishments.

That arithmetic — not the consumer — is what will recruit Wave 3's supply. A hotel CDP doing two Saturdays a month on the side can add 30 to 50 percent to a month's take-home. A bar captain at a serious cocktail bar can earn nearly the same on a single private event as on a full week of shifts. The hospitality labour market in 2026-27 is going to start moving in response.

The risks are real. The first is supply quality at scale — the only way the model works is if the platform pre-vets, trains, and stands behind every person it dispatches. The second is the relationship to the establishment — a chef earning side income on a Saturday is a chef his employer needs to know about. The third is the consumer-side mistake of confusing instant services with instant gratification. A bartender will arrive in twenty minutes if you ordered him today. Not in ten.

What is coming next

Three things to watch through 2026 and 2027.

The first profitable private-chef platform. ChefKart, COOX, BookMyChef and the cohort are still sub-scale. Whichever of them gets to ten thousand monthly bookings first will define the category, and the others will consolidate or close.

The first hospitality-employer pushback. When a hotel operator notices that a third of its kitchen brigade is moonlighting on platforms during off-shifts, it will write a policy. That policy — and the platforms' response — will shape the next five years of the labour market for skilled hospitality work.

The crossover with the wedding economy. India's destination-wedding market is on track to USD 55 billion by 2033. The platform that can dispatch a curated brigade — chef, bartender, captain, sommelier, hostess — to a 400-guest wedding within a 30-kilometre radius, end-to-end, will absorb a meaningful share of that spend.

The patience curve is not coming back. What the next wave does with it — for consumers and for the people on the supply side — is the real story of the second half of this decade.

Sources & references 8

Kaam Hire is the hospitality-only hiring platform that powers this blog. If hiring is on your mind — try it.