Archive for Covid-19

Zepto

Zepto is an Indian company founded by Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra. Just like every student who graduated in 2020, they had looked forward to their graduation, but COVID-19 had other plans. Since Stanford had gone completely online, the two of them stayed in their respective homes in India and had a significant amount of time to just think. Grocery shopping, as I’m sure populations across the globe would agree, had become more difficult with the onset of rules that came with the pandemic. A lot of India’s grocery-store apps were lacking, providing neither speedy delivery or accurate deliveries, and the two realized that they could create something better. Zepto is an app that promises groceries that are delivered in 10 minutes or less. According to Forbes, “Today, their company, Zepto, which is just under two years old, delivers hundreds of thousands of orders per day; generates several hundred million dollars in annual revenue; and has raised over $360 million in funding from investors like YC Continuity, Contrary Capital, Glade Brook Capital Partners, and Lachy Groom, most recently a Series D that values the company at over $900 million.”

India is obviously a very dense and chaotic place which makes time extremely variable. The edge over other companies comes from the condensed time within the dark store, from packing to checkout. In the Forbes article they were able to interview Aadit who said, “On the software side, we built things like a navigation system for packers to find the most ideal path inside the dark store; a scanning system to give packers the ability to scan and automatically verify items; a color-coded system on riders’ devices so that they can match their orders faster during the handshake process between packer and rider instead of looking at an order ID.On the operational side, it comes down to the way we designed racks, chillers, freezers, and handover stations. Even the way we designed the SKU maps takes into account having the fastest-moving products near the exit. Everything is built for maximum speed efficiency.”

Similar to what we have discussed in class, the idea of a quick online grocery-shopping app already existed. The two simply took the structure that already existed and improved upon it. They took the time that many deemed unfortunate and transformed prior prototypes into something extremely profitable. Zepto will most likely be making billions of dollars in revenue within the next 1-5 years, according to Aadit. They started small, and now they are scaling their business 3-5x. It really makes one think and look around for the next thing that might need improved upon. This was something that was made necessary by the pandemic, and they filled that need. It’s as simple as that. 

 

Forbes article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenli1/2022/10/10/they-raised-360-million-after-dropping-out-of-stanford-and-built-a-grocery-delivery-app-now-worth-900-million/?sh=f7a4aae3e7d9

Zepto website: https://www.zeptonow.com/

 

Avi Schiffmann – Self-Taught Website Developer

No one could have predicted that there would be a need for his website, but now it has become an important website during the COVID-19 era. 

Avi Schiffmann is a 19-year-old high school student in Washington State, USA. He gained a spotlight in 2020 because of a website he developed on his own to track COVID-19 cases throughout the world. Just a few months later, Avi’s website was getting 30 million visitors each day, which added up to over 600 million visitors. 

When he was 17 years old, Avi was looking online for the COVID-19 case numbers online and all he could find was a slightly sketchy website in Chinese that he couldn’t understand. Because of this, Avi decided to create his own website which could display COVID-19 information in an unbiased and user-friendly way. With his experience with coding and website development that he taught himself, Avi was able to build the website and code it himself. 

The website was released in January 2020 and made it possible for millions of families to stay up to date on the condition of the world during those difficult times. 

The website shows a number of different types of numbers, including total confirmed cases, total of deaths, total recovered, and total vaccinated. The website also shows cases in each country and has a map to show data per country. The website is continually updated and shows accurate data. 

 

Click here to visit the website.