Zepto CEO accuses rival firm CFO of ‘smear campaign’

Zepto co-founder and CEO Aadit Palicha has accused the chief financial officer of a rival company of orchestrating a systematic “smear campaign” against the startup, in a rare public outburst in India’s competitive quick commerce sector. Palicha, however, did not name the CFO or the rival company.

In a LinkedIn post on Sunday, he claimed that the rival CFO had been “calling our investors to make wild allegations about us with no empirical evidence, giving out false numbers/Excel sheets on Zepto through sources known to journalists, and paying bots on social media to spread a negative narrative.”