Vertical quick commerce moves beyond speed, founders bet on assortment, density for growth

Moneycontrol Startup Conclave 2026: Vertical quick commerce moves beyond speed, founders bet on assortment, density for growth

Quick commerce may have been built around the promise of delivering products in minutes but the startups operating in niche categories believe the next phase will be less about speed and more about what they can offer consumers.

Founders of Swish, Pronto and Slikk said at the Moneycontrol Startup Conclave 2026 in Bangalore that as rapid delivery becomes increasingly standardised, vertical quick commerce players will need to build deeper catalogues, solve fragmented supply and create new consumer use cases.

“The innovation in a long tail quick commerce category is not speed. Speed is standardised now. The innovation needed is now around catalogue,” fashion quick commerce startup Slikk co-founder and CEO Akshay Gulati said.

Rahul Chowdhri, partner at Stellaris Venture Partners, said vertical quick commerce could eventually span a range of categories but the size of the opportunity would depend on the sector.

“This is just a starting point for quick commerce. There is a lot more room to grow. However, the total addressable market (TAM) for each segment is sector dependent,” Chowdhri said.

For Swish, which started out with a tightly curated food catalogue, expanding the assortment has helped build new consumption occasions.

“It takes time to build consumer behaviour. We initially had just 50 SKUs. We are now serving 250 SKUs. People are now coming to us for lunch and dinner as well,” Swish founder and CEO Aniket Shah said.

“Coming later into the market gives us an idea of what has been solved and what hasn't. Because of these new use cases, we are expanding the market,” he said.

The thesis is similar for Slikk but in a category where assortment is important.

“Sixty percent of our business comes from high fashion. This proves that quick commerce will become the general mode of consumption for users,” Gulati said.

The shift suggests that vertical players are increasingly trying to use quick fulfilment as an entry point rather than the entire proposition. The bigger problem is building enough selection and relevance to make consumers return, the founders said.

For Pronto, which offers on-demand household services, the opportunity is not simply about making house help available instantly. Its broader pitch is to organise a fragmented labour market.

“The broad thesis around Pronto was never instant house help. It was to solve for the fragmented labour market,” founder and CEO Anjali Sardana said.

That puts Pronto in a broader category of vertical quick commerce businesses trying to apply the same underlying principles of rapid fulfilment and organised supply to markets beyond groceries and packaged goods.

The approach also reflects why vertical quick commerce can look very different across categories.

While Swish is using a wider food catalogue to create business, Slikk is using assortment and faster access to fashion, while Pronto is attempting to organise fragmented service providers.

The expansion of catalogues and use cases, however, does not automatically translate into better economics.

For Swish, profitability depends on how densely it can build demand.

“Profitability depends on density. It is a function of how many users consistently buy your products in a micro-market. Good quality service is a bare minimum, alongside assortment,” Shah said.

A large customer base spread thinly across a city may not necessarily produce the order frequency required to support the cost of rapid fulfilment.

Gulati pointed to different economics of fashion, where consumers can take longer to make purchasing decisions and businesses may need to build the category over a longer period.

“The only e-commerce company in India which is PAT profitable is a fashion company. In general, fashion is a patient game,” he said.

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