It’s Tuesday, and today we’re discussing Inamo, an Indian company in the quick commerce space. Founded in 2025 by Sumit Anand and Rupesh Thakare, the company recently raised an $8 million round led by Prime Venture Partners, with participation from Shastra VC, Antler India, and Gemba Capital.

We’re back to India’s quick commerce.

I’ve talked a lot about the tremendous growth of the sector, with the market reaching between $6-7 billion in 2024 and projected to grow to over $40 billion by 2030, implying a CAGR of 35-40%. In just one year, it added roughly 12 million new customers. In 2024, it accounted for 70-75% of all e-commerce grocery sales. To put into perspective how crazy that number is, in 2022 that share was 35%.

Each major player in the industry has been scaling rapidly. Blinkit increased its number of dark stores from 377 in March 2023 to 1,301 in March 2025. The company’s warehousing capacity rose from 3.75 million sq ft in FY23 to 5.6 million sq ft by March 2025. Zepto went from operating 600 dark stores to over 1,000 in under a year. The company also increased its SKU count from 6,000 to 14,000. In 2025, Instamart almost doubled the number of dark stores it operates and also increased the number of cities it covers almost five-fold, now making quick deliveries in 124 cities.

For all these businesses, this incredible growth has been enabled by a number of factors:

All the businesses I’ve mentioned have ambitious scaling plans, to say the least. Blinkit targets 3,000 dark stores by March 2027. In December, Swiggy raised over $1 billion to help it scale Instamart. Zepto also completed another funding round in October of last year to support its growth.

Everyone’s growing, everyone’s raising more and more money. The reason why these companies need so much capital is because it’s difficult to sell notoriously low-margin goods (FMCG) while also offering delivery within 15 minutes. You need to build out dark stores, hire packers and managers, and comply with regulations. You also have to deal with replenishment: stocking enough goods at each dark store, not overstocking, and dealing with spoilage. The operational pressure is tremendous.

At the same time, these platforms have to generate demand, compete on customer acquisition costs, and find new ways to monetize their massive audiences. In an ideal world, that’s where their focus would be. In an ideal world, they would turn the fixed cost of operating a dark store into a variable one. According to BCG, operating through third-party dark stores could reduce last-mile costs by 20-30%.

What we’ve seen in this space, however, is that quick commerce has gone well beyond just a couple of platforms. HomeRun, Snabbit, and Slikk are all great examples of how the expectations of the Indian consumer have evolved. And if someone assumes that their construction materials will arrive in under an hour, you can bet they expect the same from D2C brands.

Those brands, however, are used to operating in a different paradigm. They are used to monthly, or at most weekly, replenishment schedules. They operate a limited number of warehouses, if any. They aren’t used to building quick and efficient delivery systems.

Quick commerce platforms need to reduce the burden of operating dark stores. Brands need someone to help them enter the quick commerce space. And that’s what Inamo does.

Inamo describes itself as a full-stack quick commerce enablement platform and a modular “Fulfillment Engine” for platforms and brands building quick-delivery businesses. As an infrastructure-as-a-service player, it provides multiple layers of order fulfillment, including inventory management, logistics, and the technology layer. In other words, it acts as an operational layer for brands and platforms that want to launch or scale a quick commerce business. The company targets a wide range of consumer categories, including apparel, footwear, pet care, baby care, and others.

If we imagine Inamo as an operational chain, here’s what it offers:

Inamo also provides two technology solutions to manage this chain. One is a warehouse management system designed to optimize how dark stores are run. The other is a workforce management system used to manage personnel and improve productivity.

As one of the company’s investors, Adith Podhar, put it, Inamo is a picks-and-shovels business for the quick commerce space.

To deliver this offering, Inamo does many of the same things a traditional quick commerce player would. It manages various KPIs, such as picking time and delivery time, trains riders and pickers, receives shipments from suppliers, and so on. There’s a lot Inamo takes on itself, so it’s no surprise that platforms and brands are choosing to work with it.

For its customers, Inamo turns dark store operations from a fixed cost into a variable one. It removes some of the risk associated with operating a dark store in an area where demand may not be strong enough, or where competitors are in a better position. And at first glance, it may seem that Inamo itself is taking on a lot of risk by investing in dark store operations without getting enough in return.

But the more I think about it, the more it seems that the opposite is true.

Because Inamo is brand-agnostic, it can:

In both cases, it’s highly unlikely that the asset, that is, the dark store, will lose its value. There’s little to suggest that the quick commerce industry is slowing down any time soon, so there will almost always be a proverbial buyer for what Inamo is selling.

Another key part of the picks-and-shovels approach has to do with end-customer acquisition. It is still up to the quick commerce platform or the brand to acquire the customer. However, Inamo benefits from that acquisition because it is in charge of running the dark store. So the more money brands and platforms spend on acquiring customers served by the same dark store, the better it is for Inamo.

The company makes money from each order, charging a percentage of gross transaction value.

In the first months of 2026, Inamo went from operating 60 dark stores to 80. In its first full year of operations, it reached an annualized revenue run rate of about $700,000 and was profitable on a contribution margin basis.

The main challenge is the economics. As one article mentions, dark stores are expensive to run, while switching costs are low.

The more Inamo moves away from locations where demand is concentrated, the riskier opening a new dark store becomes. On top of that, it is very hard to differentiate in this space. Yes, there is a software component to the business, but how unique is that software really, especially in the age of AI?

Additionally, the more clients Inamo onboards, the harder the business becomes to run. Different companies have different SKU counts, order frequencies, product weights, and so on. And variety means complexity. Complexity leads to higher expenses because there is less room for standardization.

So there is this constant tension in the economics of the business, and it is hard to get away from it.

There’s a clear need for the product, and clear utility behind it. Plus, the market is booming. While switching costs are low, it’s not as if there is insufficient demand to absorb additional supply coming to the market.

The value proposition is also compelling: no brand wants to deal with the boring, operationally difficult part of its business. More often than not, companies outsource the things they do not want to handle themselves.

Inamo is not AWS, with its incredible margins and a proposition that only a few companies could realistically replicate. But it is also not a telecom provider laying undersea cables in the early 2000s.

Unless the company stops executing or is overtaken by better-run, better-capitalized competitors, it is hard to see it not continuing to grow.

What’s the one lesson investors and founders can take away from Inamo?

In a fast-growing market, even the least attractive but essential part of the value chain can become a strong business if it is unbundled and offered as a vendor-agnostic service.