New Delhi: Rapido is writing a new chapter in the Food Delivery space of Bengaluru. Its food delivery app, Ownly, recently achieved 50,000 orders per day in the city, only after reaching a level of 5,000 orders daily after just a couple of months.
The surge of growth is adding to the pressure for India’s two largest food delivery apps, Zomato and Swiggy, that have been the market leaders for years.
The latest figures are particularly interesting as Bengaluru has an estimated 500,000 to 600,000 food orders coming and going daily. Today, Ownly has secured over 50,000 orders and now constitutes approximately one in ten orders for food in the City.
From 5,000 to 50,000 orders
Ownly’s growth has been quick. It was initially deployed in limited areas of Bengaluru before expansion to the entire city in February-March 2026 by Rapido. At the end of March, Ownly was handling around 5,000 orders a day. By July, it had surpassed 40,000 orders per day, to take around 7% of the food delivery market in Bengaluru.
The platform has now reached over 50,000 daily orders, now in August. This equates to an increase of around 10 times in Ownly’s size in about 5 months.
What is Rapido doing differently?
What sets apart is Ownly’s no-commission approach.
The traditional food delivery apps only take a cut of the restaurant’s orders. Ownly’s pitch is unique. It lets restaurants retain a cut, but still provide consumers with food at the price they’d pay in-store. The key way the platform is able to earn revenue is by charging delivery fees.
This will help to address some of the most common gripes of both restaurants and diners: ordering food online often is way more expensive. So Rapido isn’t just looking to create another food delivery platform. It’s attempting to provide a more affordable option.
Rapido already had an advantage
Rapido entered the food delivery space with a critical asset which few startups would have had already in place: a big network of delivery partners.
The company currently has a large bike taxi, auto and cab operation, also. That means it can leverage a vast network of delivery partners and millions of people that are already using it. Ownly is also beginning to be integrated directly into Rapido’s primary app. This helps current Rapido users who are looking for food delivery service discover and utilize the same.
This may help cut down the costs of Rapido acquiring additional food delivering customers.
Restaurants are seeing more orders
This occurs at the restaurant level as well. One such example is the restaurant chain, Empire of Bengaluru. The number of orders per day in Its Ownly was gone up from 136 in March to over 1700 in July.
The company says that the increase is from other business it wasn’t seeing before. This is significant as restaurants will keep interacting with Ownly as long as it leads them to genuine customers and orders.
Why Zomato and Swiggy are taking notice
Even at the national level, Ownly is still much lesser than Zomato and Swiggy. In India Zomato handles over 2.5 Million food orders per day and Swiggy is looking at 2–2.2 Million orders per day. Ownly, in comparison, is currently doing more than 50,000 orders a day, mainly in Bengaluru.
Its speed of growth is still significant though. Some restaurant operators, who said that both Zomato and Swiggy have been more active in contacting restaurant partners and providing better commercial terms to keep them.
This indicates that this is now starting to cause pressure for Ownly, particularly on the restaurant side.
Restaurants are already unhappy with high commissions
Ownly’s growth coincides with a growing discontent among restaurant owners with the status quo of the food delivery model. The Bengaluru restaurants have expressed their discontent with commissions levied by the big food delivery companies along with discounts and other fees. Some restaurant owners even threatened to boycott Zomato and Swiggy in July if their problems were not solved.
That provides Rapido an opportunity. More restaurants might choose to list on Ownly if they can be offered better terms but not suffer a significant drop in orders.
But Ownly still has a big challenge
The first step is getting to 50,000 orders. The more difficult challenge is to make the business profitable.
There are a number of cost factors in food delivery, such as delivery partners, technology, customer support and marketing. In order to grow, Rapido will have to manage these expenses. There’s also stiff competition.
Zomato and Swiggy already have vast number of customers and thousands of restaurants on relationship. Ownly will have to invest time and money to scale up to the same degree.
The next test is expansion beyond Bengaluru
Now, Rapido is aiming to launch Ownly in more cities. The results from Bengaluru excite the company that customers and restaurants are open to experimenting with another food delivery app. The next question is whether Rapido can do the same in other cities?
Other companies are making the competition stiff as well. Swiggy has its own budget-friendly service Toing, and Zomato too is targeting the customer that is low-budget. Flipkart is also getting ready to join the food delivery arena. This implies that food deliveries could get a lot more competitive in the coming months in India.
The bigger picture
Ownly’s growth from daily order count around 5,000 to over 50,000 by August will be an important early achievement for the company Rapido. The firm has proven that there is clearly demand for a food delivery business with lower prices and better terms of business for restaurants.
But 50,000 orders are not enough to qualify Ownly as a Zomato/Swiggy competitor at the national level. The true test is now of Frederick the Great. Rapido is poised to experience the biggest competitive reinvention of the food delivery industry in years, if it can replicate the Ownly model in other cities, displace the competition and control its costs.
