How does Zomato make money?

Zomato earns commission and ad fees from restaurants, and delivery charges, a platform fee and Zomato Gold membership fees from customers. In July-September 2026 (Q2 FY27), its food delivery business booked Rs 3,879 crore of adjusted revenue on Rs 11,445 crore of net order value.

Is Zomato profitable?

Yes. Eternal, the listed parent, reported a net profit of Rs 366 crore for FY26 and Rs 125 crore for Q2 FY27. Food delivery alone made Rs 627 crore of adjusted EBITDA in Q2 FY27.

Eternal Ltd is the listed company formerly called Zomato Ltd. The name change took effect on 20 March 2025. It owns four businesses: Zomato (food delivery), Blinkit (quick commerce), District (going-out) and Hyperpure (supplies to restaurants). The Zomato app kept its name.

Is Blinkit profitable?

Blinkit has been profitable on an adjusted EBITDA basis since October-December 2025. It made Rs 184 crore in Q2 FY27, which is 0.9% of its order value. Across the four quarters of FY26, it lost Rs 277 crore on the same measure.

How much commission does Zomato charge restaurants?

Zomato does not publish its commission rates. In 2022, NRAI's president said the platforms charge 10% to 30%. In July 2026, a Bengaluru hotels association said restaurants pay 8% to 28%.

What is Zomato's platform fee?

According to news reports from March 2026, Zomato raised its platform fee from Rs 12.50 to Rs 14.90 per order, before GST. The fee was about Rs 2 when it was introduced in 2023.

Who runs Eternal now?

Albinder Dhindsa, who built Blinkit, has been Eternal's CEO since 1 February 2026. Founder Deepinder Goyal stepped down as MD and CEO and became Vice Chairman and a non-executive director from 13 March 2026.

How Zomato Makes Money: Eternal's Business Explained

The short answer: Zomato makes money by standing between hungry customers and restaurants. Restaurants pay it commission and ad fees, and customers pay delivery charges, a platform fee and membership fees. Its parent company, Eternal Ltd, now gets most of its revenue from Blinkit. Blinkit buys groceries and other goods and sells them from its own dark stores. Food delivery still makes most of the group’s profit, while Blinkit, District and the newer bets spend heavily to grow.

Key numbers
Eternal revenue from operations, FY26 (audited)	Rs 54,364 crore [2]
Eternal net profit, FY26	Rs 366 crore (FY25: Rs 527 crore) [2]
Eternal revenue from operations, Q2 FY27 (Jul-Sep 2026)	Rs 24,138 crore [1]
Eternal net profit, Q2 FY27	Rs 125 crore (Q2 FY26: Rs 65 crore) [1]
Consolidated adjusted EBITDA, Q2 FY27	Rs 666 crore [1]
Order value across Zomato, Blinkit and District (B2C NOV), Q2 FY27	Rs 35,644 crore, up 54% year on year [1]
Food delivery adjusted EBITDA, Q2 FY27	Rs 627 crore, 5.5% of order value [1]
Blinkit dark stores, 30 Sep 2026	2,751 [1]
Cash balance, 30 Sep 2026	Rs 16,475 crore [1]

Four businesses, one listed company

Most people still say “Zomato”, but the listed company has been called Eternal since March 2025 [17]. It reports four main businesses plus an “Others” bucket [1]:

Zomato (food delivery): an online marketplace. It connects you with restaurants and with independent delivery partners who bring the food [1].
Blinkit (quick commerce): delivers groceries and everyday goods from nearby dark stores within minutes. Some goods are sold by Blinkit itself and some by third-party sellers [1].
District (going-out): restaurant table bookings and dining offers, plus tickets for movies, sports, concerts and events, some of which Eternal runs itself [1].
Hyperpure (B2B supplies): sells ingredients and other supplies to restaurants and other food businesses [1].
Others: includes Bistro, a quick food-delivery format, and Nugget [1]. The Q2 FY27 letter also introduced dark.ai, a private AI assistant that the company hopes to launch globally within 2026 [1].

Here is how each business performed in July-September 2026 (Q2 FY27), as reported by Eternal [1]:

Business	Order value (NOV)	Revenue	Adjusted EBITDA
Zomato food delivery	Rs 11,445 crore (+21.5%)	Rs 3,879 crore	Rs 627 crore profit
Blinkit quick commerce	Rs 20,940 crore (+79.3%)	Rs 19,152 crore	Rs 184 crore profit
District going-out	Rs 3,259 crore (+58.0%)	Rs 304 crore	Rs 64 crore loss
Hyperpure supplies	n/a	Rs 1,154 crore	Rs 10 crore profit
Others (Bistro, Nugget)	n/a	Rs 132 crore	Rs 91 crore loss

Revenue for food delivery is “adjusted revenue”, which includes delivery charges and platform fees paid by customers [1]. Growth figures compare with the same quarter a year earlier.

For the full year FY26 (April 2025-March 2026), adding up the four quarters Eternal disclosed gives these totals [2]:

Food delivery: order value of Rs 37,993 crore and adjusted EBITDA of Rs 2,017 crore.
Blinkit: order value of Rs 48,568 crore, revenue of Rs 37,779 crore and an adjusted EBITDA loss of Rs 277 crore.
District: order value of Rs 9,399 crore and a loss of Rs 319 crore.
Hyperpure: revenue of Rs 5,366 crore and a loss of Rs 17 crore.

So Blinkit is now the bigger business by order value. In Q2 FY27 it was about 59% of order value and 78% of adjusted revenue. Food delivery still earned almost all of the profit.

Eternal says that in FY26, 109 million Indians spent more than $10 billion across Blinkit, District and Zomato [2].

Where the money on one food order goes

What the customer pays

A Zomato bill has four parts:

Food price: the menu price of the food.
Delivery fee: much of it is collected on behalf of delivery partners [1].
Platform fee: a flat charge on every order. Zomato introduced it at about Rs 2 in August 2023. News reports say it was raised from Rs 12.50 to Rs 14.90, before GST, in March 2026 [10].
Taxes.

Zomato Gold members pay a subscription. In return, they get free delivery on orders above Rs 99; Eternal lowered this threshold from Rs 199 in July-September 2025 to win more budget-conscious customers [2].

What the restaurant pays

The restaurant pays Zomato a commission on each order. Restaurants that want more visibility in the app can also buy ads. Eternal’s definition of food delivery revenue covers four streams [1]:

commission and other charges
ad revenue
the platform fee and subscription revenue
onboarding fees from restaurants and delivery partners

Zomato does not publish its commission rates. Restaurant bodies have given ranges:

NRAI: in 2022, the president of the National Restaurant Association of India said the platforms justify commissions of 10% to 30% [11].
Bengaluru: in July 2026, the president of the Bruhat Bengaluru Hotels Association said restaurants pay 8% to 28% [12].

What Zomato keeps from every Rs 100

Eternal’s Q2 FY27 numbers [1] show what happens to every Rs 100 of order value (NOV):

About Rs 34 comes to Zomato as adjusted revenue. This is Rs 3,879 crore of adjusted revenue on Rs 11,445 crore of NOV (our calculation). It includes commissions, ads, delivery charges, platform fees and Gold.
About Rs 10.30 is left after the cost of each order. This is “contribution”. From the Rs 34, Zomato pays the delivery partner for the last mile and covers its own discounts, payment gateway charges, customer support, refunds and onboarding costs [1].
About Rs 5.50 is left after fixed costs. This is adjusted EBITDA. It comes after salaries, technology, brand marketing and other overheads.

So the restaurant keeps most of the bill, and a large share of what Zomato collects goes to delivery partners. The profit Zomato keeps is a thin slice of a very large number of orders. On average, about 7.36 lakh delivery partners and 3.34 lakh restaurants were active each month in Q2 FY27 [1]. Average monthly transacting customers grew 16% year on year to 28.0 million [1].

Blinkit: a shop, not just an app

Until early 2025, Blinkit mostly worked as a marketplace and earned a commission on goods that other sellers owned. From April-June 2025, it began owning inventory itself, which Eternal calls the “1P” model [1]. Its revenue now includes the full value of the goods it sells. That is the main reason Eternal’s revenue from operations jumped from Rs 20,243 crore in FY25 to Rs 54,364 crore in FY26 [2].

How Blinkit makes money

Blinkit’s revenue includes [1]:

the value of goods it sells
commission on goods that third-party sellers still own
delivery charges and fees
ad revenue from brands
warehousing and other services

In Q2 FY27, Blinkit’s gross profit was 27.5% of order value, Rs 5,760 crore. Gross profit is what is left after the cost of the goods [1].

Blinkit has decided not to launch its own private-label brands. Albinder Dhindsa says Blinkit would rather stay a “fair and neutral platform” for brands and earn advertising revenue as those brands grow [1].

Why it grows faster than food delivery

Three things are driving Blinkit’s growth:

More products: in Delhi NCR, Blinkit now stocks about 1 lakh items, up from about 80,000 in January-March 2026 [1].
More cities: in smaller cities, new stores reach 1,000 orders a day about as fast as metro stores, and basket sizes are 85-90% of metro levels [1].
Loyal customers: a group of customers spends nearly three times as much with Blinkit three years after joining as in its first quarter [3].

In Q2 FY27, Blinkit handled 398.9 million orders. The average basket after discounts was Rs 525, and 37.0 million customers ordered each month [1].

Why it eats cash

A dark store needs space, shelves, cold storage, pickers and stock. Eternal now expects each store to need about Rs 2.5 crore of capital, including warehousing [3]. It has spent about Rs 3,000 crore over four years to build about 1.9 crore square feet of store and warehouse space [3].

Owning inventory also ties up working capital. Eternal reports inventory losses from expiry, damage and pilferage of about 1.8% of order value [3].

New stores lose money in their first months [1]. Even so, Eternal plans to grow from 2,751 stores now to more than 3,500 by March 2027 and about 5,000 by March 2028 [1].

The cash effect showed up in Q2 FY27. Eternal earned Rs 666 crore of adjusted EBITDA. But it spent Rs 941 crore on capital expenditure, and another Rs 1,463 crore went into working capital, partly to stock up for the festive season [1]. As a result, its cash balance fell by Rs 1,813 crore in the quarter [1].

Blinkit’s adjusted EBITDA margin is only 0.9% today, but Eternal says its mature cities already earn more than 5% [1]. Its long-run target is about 6% [3].

Hyperpure and District

Hyperpure supplies about 85,000 restaurants, up from 62,000 a year earlier [1]. It delivers within two hours in all major cities and competes on reliability rather than the lowest price [1].

Its revenue fell in FY26. That is because sales it used to make to Blinkit’s sellers now sit inside Blinkit’s own inventory business [1]. On the restaurant-supply side, Hyperpure grew 22.7% in Q2 FY27 and made a small profit [1].

District earns convenience fees, ticketing revenue and restaurant-related income. Its revenue is about 9% of its order value (Rs 304 crore on Rs 3,259 crore in Q2 FY27; our calculation) [1]. It lists more than 45,000 restaurants, 5,000 movie screens and 7,500 events [3].

District still loses money. Eternal says it is on track to break even within the four to six quarters it promised in January 2026 [1]. By FY30, it is targeting Rs 28,000 crore of order value and Rs 1,400 crore of adjusted EBITDA [1].

Eternal also says District is its business most at risk from AI shopping agents. A restaurant table or concert ticket can be booked through other channels, unlike a meal or grocery order that depends on Zomato’s or Blinkit’s own delivery network [1].

The jargon, in plain words

GOV (gross order value): the full value of orders before any discounts, including delivery charges, platform fee and taxes [1]. Eternal stopped reporting food delivery GOV from April-June 2026 [3].
NOV (net order value): GOV minus all discounts, whether funded by the restaurant, Zomato, a bank or anyone else [1]. This is now Eternal’s main measure of how much business it does.
Take rate: the share of order value a platform keeps as revenue. Eternal does not report a single take rate. On its numbers, food delivery’s adjusted revenue was about 34% of NOV in Q2 FY27, including the delivery fees it passes on to partners.
Contribution: what is left from each order after its direct costs, such as last-mile delivery, discounts, payment fees, support and refunds [1]. This shows whether an extra order makes money.
Adjusted EBITDA: EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation), plus employee stock-option costs, minus rent [1]. This measure is not net profit. In FY26, Eternal’s adjusted EBITDA (sum of four quarters) was Rs 1,189 crore, but its net profit was Rs 366 crore [2]. The difference comes mostly from depreciation (Rs 1,597 crore) and share-based pay (Rs 819 crore), partly offset by Rs 1,396 crore of other income such as treasury interest [1].

How it got here

In 2008, Deepinder Goyal rode a motorbike around Delhi collecting restaurant menus, scanning them and putting them online [2]. The company was incorporated on 18 January 2010 as DC Foodiebay Online Services Pvt Ltd and renamed Zomato Media Pvt Ltd in 2012 [4]. For years it was a listings, reviews and reservations business. It started delivering food only in 2017 [2].

Zomato’s initial public offering opened on 14 July 2021. It sought up to Rs 9,375 crore: Rs 9,000 crore of fresh shares and Rs 375 crore sold by Info Edge [4]. In June 2022, Zomato agreed to buy Blinkit, formerly Grofers, in an all-stock deal [18]. In 2025, the parent was renamed Eternal so that it was not identified only with food delivery [17].

On 1 February 2026, Goyal handed over as CEO to Blinkit’s Albinder Dhindsa and later became Vice Chairman [2]. Goyal says it took 18 years to reach $10 billion of annual order value, and 16 years to reach adjusted EBITDA profit in FY24 [2].

The fights it is in

Competition. Swiggy, with its Instamart grocery app, and Zepto compete directly with Zomato and Blinkit. Eternal admitted in April 2026 that “aggressive discounting” by rivals was producing “poor-quality growth” in quick commerce [2]. In October 2026, it said new stores were still clearing its return targets despite the competition [1].

Two cheaper food apps have also arrived. Swiggy launched Toing in Pune in September 2025, with most dishes priced at Rs 100-150 [16]. Rapido’s Ownly in Bengaluru charges no platform fee [10]. Eternal says their impact has been “limited” and that Bistro is its own answer for meals at Rs 50-150 [3].

The CCI probe. NRAI complained to the Competition Commission of India (CCI) in 2021, and the CCI ordered an investigation in 2022 [7]. In November 2024, Reuters reported that the investigators had found two problems [8]:

Zomato offered lower commissions to restaurants that listed only with it.
Both Zomato and Swiggy pushed restaurants to keep the same prices across platforms.

In July 2026, NRAI asked the CCI for interim relief. A source close to Zomato said its standard agreements carry no exclusivity clause and that it had dropped price-matching requirements by April 2026 [6]. The CCI had not issued a final order as of those reports [7].

Separately, the CCI closed a consumer’s complaint about Zomato’s platform fee in July 2026. It found no prima facie violation [9]. A complaint by FMCG distributors about quick-commerce pricing was at the stage where the CCI had sought more evidence, as of April 2025 [15].

Tax. GST authorities have raised demands and notices against Eternal over GST on delivery charges [1]:

orders of Rs 420 crore for October 2019 to March 2022
orders of Rs 14 crore in Andhra Pradesh
notices of Rs 119 crore for 2022-23

Eternal is contesting them and says it has a strong case. Since a change in the law in September 2025, it has been paying GST on these charges [1].

Gig-worker rules. India’s new labour codes took effect on 21 November 2025, and their rules were notified on 8 May 2026 [1]. Under the Code on Social Security, aggregators must pay 1-2% of annual turnover into a welfare fund, capped at 5% of what they pay gig workers [5].

Eternal is challenging Karnataka’s gig-worker law in court. It says the rules in force so far have no material impact on its results [1].

In January 2026, after the Labour Ministry intervened, Blinkit dropped its “10 minutes” delivery tagline. Eternal told the stock exchanges this meant “no change in business model” [14].

Restaurant anger. In July 2026, more than 1,000 hotel and restaurant owners in Bengaluru threatened to leave the apps over commissions and deductions [12]. In August, Zomato agreed that restaurant-funded promotions would be opt-in, with approval by OTP. The restaurants then deferred their boycott [13].

Lessons for founders

The first idea is rarely the business. Zomato spent nine years on listings and reviews before delivering food, and Grofers went through several pivots before becoming Blinkit [2]. Goyal calls the failed threads “the cost of finding the one that works” [2].
Know your contribution margin before you scale. Eternal tracks whether each order covers its direct costs, city by city. It says cities making up about 96% of Blinkit’s order value are contribution-positive and about 70% are adjusted-EBITDA-positive. It uses this as evidence that the model works before profits show up in the total [1].
Owning the shelf changes your cash cycle. Blinkit’s inventory model brings better margin control but needs capital. Even a profitable quarter can reduce cash when stock and stores are being built [1].
Every fee needs a story the other side can accept. Platform fees, commissions and promotions fund the model. They have also brought antitrust complaints, boycott threats and regulatory pressure [6][9][12]. Fees that feel fair to customers and partners last longer.

An explainer for general reading, based on public records as of 10 November 2026. Not investment, tax or legal advice.