Amitesh Jha resigned as chief executive of Swiggy Instamart on 28 July. Two days later Swiggy announced that Instamart had reached contribution breakeven, the thing he had been hired to deliver. He left immediately before his own results.
Nandita Sinha took over on 3 August. Sriharsha Majety, Swiggy’s group chief executive, called her “one of India’s most accomplished consumer internet leaders.” She is. The business she has walked into is the harder subject.
The trade Jha made
Instamart’s contribution margin improved 440 basis points over the year to minus 0.2% of gross order value, and Swiggy’s shareholder letter says the crossover happened in May 2026. Contribution loss had peaked at 5.6% of order value fifteen months earlier, so the repair is real. Majety’s line in the release was a victory lap with a date attached: “In quick commerce, we delivered contribution breakeven exactly as we guided a year ago, a milestone that marks a real inflection point for the business.”
Swiggy also said, in the same letter, how it got there. It shed more than four million unprofitable users, and it acknowledged that doing so weighed on Instamart’s sequential growth. Average revenue per order rose to ₹108 from ₹97. Gross order value grew 39.8% over the year to ₹7,907 crore, which sounds like acceleration until you notice which lever was pulled: the business got better at charging the customers it kept, having stopped serving the ones it could not charge.
Jha made that trade deliberately, and it is defensible. “My mandate was to prove that assumption wrong,” he wrote on LinkedIn of the belief that quick commerce could never work financially, and then, “my specific mandate is complete.” Completing that mandate is also why the job was open.
What she is measured against
Quick commerce is still losing Swiggy about ₹778 crore a quarter at the adjusted EBITDA line, down from ₹896 crore a year earlier and ₹858 crore in the previous quarter. Group net loss narrowed 34% to ₹791 crore. From 1 April 2026 Instamart has been carried as a discontinued operation in Swiggy’s standalone accounts, which is what turns a standalone loss into a ₹350 crore standalone profit without anything changing on the ground.
Blinkit did not make the same trade. Zepto, which filed its draft prospectus in June, reported FY26 revenue of ₹22,624 crore against ₹11,110 crore the year before, a net loss of ₹5,905 crore, and 1,139 dark stores across 66 cities. Zepto is burning far more and growing far faster. Instamart operates in 131 cities and has to decide, quarter by quarter, which of those two things it wants to be.
The case against
JM Financial has a Reduce rating on Swiggy with a target of ₹250, and continues to assign zero value to Instamart, the supply chain business and platform innovation, citing limited visibility on profitability. A brokerage marking a business at zero is saying the strategy is the problem, not the quarter, and a strategy problem is usually what a new chief executive is appointed to fix. Swiggy’s shares are down about 31% over a year.
Sinha’s own record has one gap in it. She ran Myntra from January 2022, after nine years inside Flipkart, and left in April 2026 with no explanation from Flipkart, which told Indian Retailer only that it does not comment on market speculation. Reporting attributed it to a group reshuffle ahead of a possible Flipkart listing. Nobody has confirmed that on the record.
She has run a fashion marketplace with an established position and a working model. Instamart is neither. She can operate. The open question is whether Instamart’s problem is operational at all, or whether it simply arrived second in a category where being second costs ₹778 crore a quarter to stay in.
Sources
- The Hindu, on the resignation and the appointment, 28 July 2026
- Business Standard, on the exchange filing, 28 July 2026
- Swiggy, Q1 FY27 press release with Instamart gross order value, contribution margin and the Majety quote, 30 July 2026
- Inc42, on the May 2026 crossover, the four million shed users and the adjusted EBITDA losses, 30 July 2026
- Entrackr, on JM Financial’s Reduce rating and its zero valuation of Instamart, 8 July 2026
- Inc42, on Zepto’s FY26 revenue, loss and dark-store count from its updated draft prospectus, 9 June 2026
- SEBI, Zepto Limited updated draft red herring prospectus, June 2026
- Deccan Herald, on her exit from Myntra, 2 April 2026
- The Times of India, on the regulatory filing, 28 July 2026
