In 2016, in a rented flat in Gurgaon, a 24-year-old was doing what he had done every morning since childhood: cooking two eggs. He had carried them home in a polybag. One had cracked on the way. When he broke the rest open, the yolk was pale and ran like water.
Most people would call that a bad morning. Abhishek Negi read it as a mispriced market. India was consuming 63 eggs per person per year against a global average of 250, while China and much of Southeast Asia crossed 350. The industry read that gap as weak demand. Abhishek read it as a distribution failure. India’s egg market was worth ₹1 lakh crore, growing 6% a year, and more than 95% of it was unbranded, unpackaged, sold loose from a crate.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
The failure that set the filter
Before Eggoz there was Roder, an intercity cab startup Abhishek co-founded in 2014, a year out of IIT Kharagpur. It raised about ₹2 crore and it solved a real problem: one-way trips priced as two-way. It also had arithmetic that never closed. Average order value around ₹2,000, take rate around ₹300, and ₹100 to ₹150 spent acquiring a customer who travelled outstation maybe twice a year. Then Uber entered, Ola consolidated, demonetisation landed, and both giants launched intercity.
They wound it down in 2017. No acquirer.
Shutting down a company is much harder than starting a business. You have raised funds from investors, you have built a team who are relying on you for their career, for their income, for their families. Ultimately it’s a let-down for everyone.
The lesson he took was not to raise faster.
That was my learning from my first venture. From the get-go, from the first product itself, the product has to be profitable. You have to find ways by which you’re not really dependent on external capital always.
That single filter explains the next decision, which looked absurd at the time.
Three years in Bihar Sharif
Rather than buy eggs and put a logo on them, Abhishek and his co-founders relocated to Bihar Sharif and built a poultry farm. An ₹80 lakh angel round in 2018, raised on an idea and nothing else, went entirely into a 2,000-bird shed.
The reason was physical. An egg hides its own quality.
Egg is a shelled product. Keep five different eggs from your own farm, different ages. You will not know if this is new, this is old, this is good. If I procure eggs from the market, aggregate them and pack them under my brand name, how can I assure quality?
By 2020 they were running close to five farms across North India with roughly one lakh birds and about ₹3 crore of revenue, selling loose into local omelette counters. The commercial insight arrived there, not in a boardroom. They raised their price by 20 paise. One vendor refused and switched suppliers. Within days he came back, because his own counter sales had dropped. Customers had tasted the difference in a product everyone treated as a commodity.
Then April 2020 nearly ended it. A rumour that eggs spread Covid collapsed prices.
We were not even getting 50 paise for our eggs. And the birds which are with you, they will continue to consume feed. It’s a factory that never stops.
That week produced the strategy.
As a seller who is selling white label at commodity rates, we have no control over our selling price. If it’s 4 rupees, it will be 5 rupees, 6 rupees, and then it will be 2 rupees. So this can’t be a business.
They shut the owned farms, moved to Gurgaon, converted production to roughly 20 contracted partner farmers running Eggoz feed protocols, and started hand-stamping every egg with an imported food-grade stamp, sitting in a parked car at night for three months.
What quick commerce solved
Eggoz controls quality upstream, in the feed, because there is no meaningful post-harvest test for an egg. Herbal feed, no chemical concentrates or routine antibiotics, marigold extract for the orange yolk. Downstream, 11 automated checks, grading above 50 to 52 grams for the premium line, and market delivery within 48 hours against a 21-day shelf life.
The channel insight was behavioural.
Eggs and bread are typically last-minute purchases. It’s morning and it came out that there is no eggs in the house.
Ten-minute delivery is the only channel whose latency matches that moment. Quick commerce now drives over 80% of revenue and carried Eggoz into 20 to 25 cities without a local sales team in any of them. General trade, still largely Delhi NCR, runs past 5,000 storefronts on a three-day restocking cycle.
The numbers followed. Revenue moved from ₹11.75 crore in FY21 to ₹55.5 crore in FY23, ₹73 crore in FY24, and ₹130 crore in FY25, a 78% jump, with losses narrowing to ₹23 crore. Raw egg procurement alone accounted for ₹103 crore of ₹154 crore in operating costs, which is what a thin-margin perishable business looks like from the inside. In Q4 FY25 the company hit EBITDA breakeven at a peak run rate of ₹200 crore. In June 2025 it raised a $20 million Series C led by Gaja Capital at roughly ₹460 to ₹500 crore, taking lifetime funding to about $37 million. Abhishek puts the current run rate above ₹250 crore. FY26 added Kolkata, Ahmedabad and Kochi.
Roughly 25% of procured eggs still fail grading. Those go into pasteurised liquid egg, frozen patties at 95% egg content and nuggets sold to QSR chains, turning the rejection rate into a hedge against commodity price swings.
I pushed him on the standard founder line about persisting until you get one yes, given that Roder deserved to die. The answer was better for being challenged.
If something is fundamentally not working after a while, maybe it is a business model issue, or a mismatch of the team who is running it. It’s better to call it quits right now so that you don’t waste any money over it.
Abhishek has run both experiments, the one where you quit and the one where you don’t. That is rarer than it sounds, and the branded slice of India’s egg market is still under 5%.
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Akshay Datt