Rapido Forays into Food Delivery Sector with Ownly

Startup Rapido plans to leverage its street smarts to dominate the food-delivery area, just like it did in India's bike-taxi business. The Bengaluru-based startup is putting its subscription-based meal delivery service, Ownly, out there in the hopes of competing with Zomato Ltd and Swiggy Ltd.

The business is planning to capitalise on the increasing number of Indian consumers who are angry about what they call "sticker shock". It is a combination of menu prices, platform fees, and delivery charges that can cause a bill to increase by 50% before checkout. The idea behind Rapido's move is straightforward: the market is eager to see a business that values honest pricing more than large commissions.

Rapido’s Ownly to Begin Innings from Bengaluru

To kick things off, Rapido's Ownly is now collaborating with over 20,000 eateries in Bengaluru. Rapido co-founder Aravind Sanka estimates that 5,000 of these eateries are making their debut in the ecosystem of meal delivery apps. According to Sanka, most of these Bengaluru eateries are mom-and-pop shops that couldn't survive the steep discounts and huge commissions offered by food delivery services like Swiggy and Zomato.

Working with these types of eateries is essential to Ownly's approach, which we will implement in every location it expands into. For the past eight months, the app has been available in Bengaluru with very little investment in online advertising. According to Sanka, eateries will start to appreciate the app's zero-commission approach as the number of users increases. Everything is on the line.

As of now, the combined quarterly gross order value of Swiggy and Zomato is around INR 19,000 crore. As Rapido's former backer Swiggy sells up its shares, to be clear of any potential conflicts of interest, the company is in talks with investors to fund around $600 million. The space is challenging to traverse, as demonstrated by the well-funded but unsuccessful endeavours of Ola and Uber. The goal for Rapido is to demonstrate the viability of its cost-effective transportation technique in the challenging food logistics industry. Swiggy completed 294 million total platform orders in Q3 FY26, or about 3.2 million per day across companies, with an average of 18.1 million customers transacting each month and 270,200 restaurant partners.

Ownly’s Expansion Strategy

Rapido intends to use the city of Bengaluru as a stepping stone to further expansion in neighbouring tier II cities and other metro areas. The business claims that, instead of focusing on smaller cities first, Ownly will expand into metro areas and then neighbouring tier II regions. Regarding monetisation, the company stated that making money off of customers is not the long-term goal. On the contrary, Ownly anticipates that restaurant memberships will eventually constitute its primary source of revenue.

According to the founder, the most painful part of the process is not only the commissions but also all of the additional costs that are added to the order. The final price a consumer pays could be significantly more than the initial purchase price; for example, an item priced at 150 INR could finish up costing about 230 INR after including packaging costs, delivery charges, and other add-ons.