Zepto taps big data to court consumer brands

In a bid to diversify beyond 10-minute grocery delivery, Zepto has launched ‘Zepto Atom’—a data insights subscription aimed at consumer brands in India. The offering is positioned as a challenger to legacy consumer analytics providers, with a proposition that leans on the company’s volume of daily data points and ability to deliver hyperlocal, real-time intelligence at a lower cost.

Aadit Palicha, co-founder and CEO of Zepto, said, “Zepto Atom is a serious attempt by our category and tech teams to build a disruptive new product in the consumer analytics industry in India. We believe we can harness the millions of data points Zepto generates every day to give brands customised and real-time insights on their products at a much more competitive price point than they are currently incurring.”

Zepto’s bet is simple: with over 100 million data events logged daily—ranging from user interactions and purchase behaviours to product impressions and conversions—it believes it has enough scale to offer brands a granular view of how their products perform, broken down to the level of individual PIN codes.

From dashboards to dialogue

Zepto Atom builds on the company’s existing ‘Zepto Brand Portal’, a dashboard that gives brands basic daily data on product performance, and which is available for free to sellers on the platform. Zepto Atom, however, is a paid subscription service offering deeper analytical capabilities that are currently not standard across Indian e-commerce platforms.

One of its key features is PIN-code level analysis. Brands using Atom can view a heat map of their presence across neighbourhoods and identify where their sales are under-indexed. The goal is to enable targeted interventions—be it pricing, distribution, or media placements—in very specific localities.

Another draw is its “live metrics visibility”, which updates sales and conversion data every minute. This enables marketers to adjust campaigns, pricing or product placements in real-time, based on how customer engagement fluctuates over hours or days.

Zepto Atom also comes with a built-in NLP assistant called Zepto GPT, trained on the platform’s data. Brands can ask it questions like, ‘How can I grow my market share in Bengaluru for the protein bar category?’ or ‘What are the key consumer preferences driving energy drink sales among Gen Z in Mumbai?’

Palicha said, “We intend to invest significant engineering bandwidth behind improving this product over the next 12 months, with new features in the pipeline like AI-generated customer personas or automated survey features targeted for certain customer cohorts.”

Additionally, Atom offers behavioural insights including customer retention metrics, share-of-voice on homepage real estate, search visibility, and full-funnel tracking of consumer purchase behaviour.

The platform also plugs into Zepto’s advertising service Jarvis, launched in late 2024, which enables brands to run campaigns on Zepto itself. While Jarvis targets both small and large advertisers with in-app campaigns, Atom aims to help those same brands understand the impact of those campaigns with greater precision.

The problem with precision

Delivering those insights in real time, however, is no small feat. Zepto’s systems log over 100 million daily events, which translates to 1,157 events per second. Attempting to store and query this information using conventional methods would require significant infrastructure and often result in unacceptable lags.

According to Zepto, storing just a month’s worth of data at the record level would require about 1.2 terabytes of storage. Moreover, querying billions of records to extract actionable insights could take minutes—or longer—which doesn’t work in an environment where decisions are made on-the-fly.

Then there’s the ‘advertiser’s dilemma’. Zepto outlines this through a common targeting request: “tech-savvy millennials who have purchased smartphones in the last 30 days and have shown interest in fitness apps.” The issue here is scale. Too narrow a cohort, and the campaign underdelivers. Too broad, and it lacks relevance.

Hence, Zepto leans on data sketches—streaming algorithms designed for big data problems where approximate results with error bounds are acceptable. These sketches don’t try to count every data point but instead estimate them using statistical models.

According to the copmany, sketches solve several problems: they take up constant space regardless of the data volume, can be merged easily, process new data fast, and allow for sub-second querying.

“Understanding data sketches deeply is probably a university course and we will skip what they are but focus on what they are capable of,” reads one internal technical explanation.

These techniques allow Zepto to offer something close to real-time insight across vast amounts of consumer behaviour data—something traditional research agencies typically take weeks, if not months, to deliver through surveys and panels.

A cheaper alternative—or a new category?

The Indian consumer analytics industry, estimated to be worth over INR 1,000 crore, has long been dominated by legacy multinational firms offering expensive and often retrospective insights. Zepto’s proposition is to offer a significantly lower-priced subscription that promises more real-time, granular data.

However, whether brands will trust these algorithmic approximations over traditional market research methods remains to be seen.

While Zepto’s offering is based on first-party behavioural data—sales, impressions, time of purchase—it lacks the kind of attitudinal insights that qualitative research firms specialise in. That said, with future plans for automated surveys and AI-generated personas, Zepto is clearly looking to bridge that gap.

Zepto’s in-house data stack is built to not just handle product analytics but also enable advertisers to activate those insights through Jarvis. The full-stack approach—data, media, delivery—is what gives Zepto confidence in its differentiation.

Over the last few months, the company has also sharpened its creative chops, producing quick-turnaround ad campaigns that are built in-house and tailored for its user base. With only a few seconds of consumer attention to play with, Zepto leans into brevity and entertainment.

“In the world of advertising, data is both our greatest asset and our most formidable challenge,” one company statement reads.

That’s reflected in how Zepto has structured its stack—optimising for speed, precision and responsiveness without the bulk of traditional market research methods.

Will brands bite?

Zepto’s challenge now is less about the tech, and more about market adoption. Many brand marketers still rely on agency-recommended legacy tools or syndicated research to guide product and media decisions. Convincing them to switch—or at least augment—those systems with a platform like Zepto Atom will depend on proof of ROI, trust in the data, and possibly early success stories.

But in a market that’s moving increasingly toward direct-to-consumer relationships, and where brands are under pressure to deliver growth in localised, micro-markets, the appetite for new insights tools is growing.

Whether Zepto Atom becomes a real alternative to traditional research or simply a complementary performance dashboard remains to be seen. But one thing is clear—it has arrived at a time when brands are eager for faster, cheaper, and more granular answers.