Rapido, the startup that used its street smarts to dominate India’s bike-taxi market, is planning to replicate this success in the food-delivery space. By launching its food-delivery app, Ownly, the Bengaluru-based company is betting it can take the fight to Zomato Ltd and Swiggy Ltd using a subscription-based model.
Based on Mint’s conversations with at least two Rapido executives, the company believes dissatisfaction has created space for a new challenger.
The startup’s strategy is to tap into Indian consumers’ growing frustration over ‘sticker shock’—a melange of menu prices, platform fees, and delivery charges that can make a bill shoot up by 50% before checkout. Rapido’s move relies on a simple thought: that the market is keen to see a company that prioritizes transparent pricing over heavy commissions.
To start with, Rapido’s Ownly has begun working with around 20,000 restaurants in Bengaluru. According to Aravind Sanka, Rapido co-founder, about 5,000 of those restaurants are coming on board for the first time into the food delivery app ecosystem.
“These are largely small, mom-and-pop outlets in Bengaluru that are absent from Swiggy and Zomato because they found deep discounting and high commissions unsustainable. As a core part of Ownly’s strategy, we will work with such restaurants in every city we enter,” Sanka added.
The app has been live in Bengaluru for the last 8 months with minimal online ad expenditure.
Sanka said that as customer demand grows, restaurants will see value in the app’s zero-commission model.
The stakes are immense. Swiggy and Zomato currently command a combined quarterly gross order value of nearly ₹19,000 crore. Rapido is talking to investors to raise about $600 million, as its former supporter, Swiggy, divests its stake to avoid a conflict of interest.
Profitability issue
The space is difficult to navigate, as seen by the well-funded but failed attempts of Uber and Ola. For Rapido, the plan is to show that its low-cost transport strategy can work in the tough world of food logistics.
In Q3FY26, Swiggy had 18.1 million average monthly transacting users and 270,200 restaurant partners, and processed 294 million total platform orders, or roughly 3.2 million a day across businesses.
Rapido plans to use the city as a playbook before expanding to other metro markets and then to nearby tier II cities.
A second Rapido executive said Ownly’s expansion strategy will be metro-first, followed by surrounding tier II markets, rather than a pure smaller-city-first play.
On monetisation, the executive said the long-term plan is not to make money from customers. Instead, restaurant subscriptions are expected to become Ownly’s main revenue lever over time.
Restaurant onboarding may be the easier part of Rapido’s Ownly bet, but switching consumers to a new app is the real challenge, said a restaurant owner who runs a large dessert chain and was approached by Ownly but has not yet decided whether to list on the platform. The founder asked to remain anonymous as he did not want to comment publicly on a potential partner.
“Food delivery app users typically spend a lot of time browsing by craving or category, not just brand. This behaviour is so ingrained that the app’s UI and UX are built to feed this kind of browsing habit. How Ownly breaks this will have to be seen,” the founder said.
What hurts most, in the founder’s view, is not just commissions but the full stack of charges added to the order. Packaging fees, delivery charges and other add-ons can sharply raise the checkout price; a ₹150 item can end up costing around ₹230 by the time the customer pays.
The third competitor
Sagar Daryani, co-founder of Wow! Momo and president of the National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI), the industry body that represents over five lakh restaurants across 24 cities, said the starting point for understanding Rapido’s entry is simple: the restaurant industry had already concluded it needed a third player.
On monetisation, Daryani said restaurants would accept a subscription or slab-based fee—similar to how Rapido charges bike-taxi operators per ride or via a monthly recurring fee—as long as commissions stay low and discounting stays light.
“You can’t get it for free. Rapido also has to make money,” he added.
The road Rapido is attempting has claimed casualties. Ola acquired Foodpanda India in 2017 and invested an estimated $200 million before shutting the business down in 2019. Uber entered the Indian food delivery market the same year but sold the unit to Zomato in January 2020.
The broader context is sobering: Zomato raised roughly $1.6 billion in private funding before its 2021 initial public offering (IPO), while Swiggy raised about $3.6 billion before listing in November 2024—capital that funded years of discounting, logistics build-out and customer acquisition before either platform approached profitability.
Rapido, which is currently in talks to raise a fresh $500–600 million round from investors including Accel, is entering that same market now that its largest backer, Swiggy, has exited its stake precisely because of the conflict of interest Ownly creates.