Zomato has a new co-founder- who didn't "found" the company!

In a recent development as per media reports, Zomato elevated Delivery Head Mohit Gupta as part of its Founders Programme. He is now the fourth co-founder of the company. Mohit had joined Zomato in 2018 from MakeMyTrip.

Previously, the company promoted Gaurav Gupta as a cofounder in 2019. Co-founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal announced this development in an e-mail to the employees.

What did the email read?

In the said email for employees, Deepinder Goyal said:

While the foundation of Zomato was built before Mohit Gupta joined us, he has been instrumental in significantly strengthening it over the last two years. When I introduced the Founders Programme a little over a year ago, I outlined a few qualities that all founders must exhibit. These qualities include trustworthiness, commitment and resilience among other things. MG checks all these boxes and more. Mohit is very committed to building Zomato for the long term and has extremely high levels of ownership. So much so that he has taken a 100% salary cut twice in the last two years to help the organisation wade through some hard times.

Gupta was with MMT for 10 years before joining Zomato.

So Mohit is not the "founder" of Zomato?

No, Mohit joined the food-delivery company as the Delivery Head. He worked with MMT previously. Also, last year, the company gave the title of co-founder to Gaurav Gupta who was the COO at the time.

The company had only last year launched the Founder's Programme. Here, where they promoted people in the company to the "founder" level. Zomato is not alone. Earlier this month, rival Swiggy saw the exit of one of its co-founder Rahul Jaimini. He subsequently joined career accelerator startup Pesto Tech (as co-founder). Jaimini, however, continues to be a board member and a shareholder at the food ordering startup.