Meet man, turned WhatsApp group into Rs 6400 crore firm, failing to pay salaries, got Rs 16000000000 from Mukesh Ambani

Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man with a massive net worth of 929925 crore, is also the richest person in Asia. He is the chairperson of Reliance Industries which is the most valuable company in India with a market cap of Rs 1936000 crore. To achieve such great wealth, Mukesh Ambani invested in a wide range of companies through his subsidiaries over the years. One of the key subsidiaries of Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries is Reliance Retail which is a key investor in many brands in India. One of the popular companies that got Mukesh Ambani’s attention is instant delivery app Dunzo which is currently in major crisis. Dunzo was founded by Kabeer Biswas in 2014. Surprisingly, it was just a WhatsApp group that grew significantly to become a Rs 6400 crore company. Although the company was an improved version of a WhatsApp group where customers used to place their orders, it got Mukesh Ambani’s attention and he was tempted to invest more than Rs 1600 crore. The mastermind behind the idea of starting a business from a WhatsApp group is Kabeer Biswas.

It is worth noting that Dunzo is not Kabeer Biswas’ first startup. His first company was Hoppr which was acquired by Hike, giving him a push to pursue his entrepreneurial journey. Kabeer Biswas is a computer science engineer who explored his interest by working in a plastic factory in Silvassa before he decided to pursue MBA. After getting some business skills, he polished them at sales and customer service at Airtel.

To complete the transition of Hoppr, he came to Bengaluru and that’s where he teamed up with Ankur Agarwal, Dalvir Suri, and Mukund Jha to start Dunzo. The platform used to deliver groceries, essential supplies and other commodities even before Blinkit and Swiggy Instamart.

Although Dunzo is quite popular in metro cities now, it started out as a WhatsApp group where customers used to post their orders. With continuous growth and investment, a proper Dunzo app was formed and the company expanded to more cities. Soon, the startup got interest from Mukesh Ambani and his company Reliance Retail ended up investing USD 200 million. The investment took the valuation of Dunzo to over USD 775 million (over Rs 6400 crore), according to The Times of India.

Dunzo has delayed their employee’s salaries multiple times over the past year. It has posted a loss of Rs 1,800 crore in FY23, a 288 per cent increase from the previous year. The company has also been hit by the departure of several top-level executives, including co-founders and its finance head.