The third installment of our new Founders & Emerging Leaders series, following North America and Europe. This one covers Asia.
Aadit Palicha — Zepto
Palicha co-founded Zepto, a quick-commerce grocery delivery company built around 10-minute delivery, at 19 years old, dropping out of Stanford’s computer science program to pursue it with co-founder Kaivalya Vohra after an earlier venture, KiranaKart, hadn’t found its footing. Born in Mumbai and raised partly in Dubai, Palicha had already been admitted to Stanford with a near-perfect academic record before deciding the company was worth leaving school for.
Zepto’s growth turned Palicha into India’s youngest CEO of a publicly listed company when the company completed its IPO in 2026, at a listing valuation reported around $5 billion — a genuinely rare outcome for a founder who started the company as a teenager rather than after an established career.
Why he made this list: the specific detail worth noting isn’t just his age — it’s that Zepto is his second real attempt at solving the same underlying problem, after KiranaKart’s earlier struggles, rather than a single first idea that happened to work. That’s a more instructive pattern for other young founders than a clean, one-shot success story would be.
Closing this installment
Three continents, five founders — each picked for a specific origin story or track record, not just a headline valuation. A pattern worth naming: three of the five had already built and struggled with an earlier venture before the one that actually scaled. If there’s a single throughline across this first Founders & Emerging Leaders installment, it’s that the visible success rarely came from a single, first attempt — it came after an earlier one that didn’t fully work.
