Why We Invested in Peeko

Rebuilding How India Shops for its Children

Anoop N Menon & Samarth Gudwala

27th August, 2026

India buys more for its children than almost any country on earth, and it still buys it much the way it did twenty years ago: in a crowded shop, on a weekday evening, with a toddler in tow.

The numbers make the paradox obvious. India’s baby and kids market is projected to reach ~$36Bn by 2028, powered by ~25 million annual births and the world’s largest child population at 370Mn+. Yet the category remains overwhelmingly offline. FirstCry, the largest organised player at roughly ₹10,000 Cr of GMV, accounts for only ~6% of it. Nearly every other rupee is still spent in unorganised trade.

Demand isn’t the constraint. Nothing on offer fits how parents actually shop. That’s why we’re excited to announce our investment in Peeko, a vertical quick-commerce platform built for urban parents of young children.

We started with mothers, and worked our way backwards

Spend time with parents of under-sixes and the same frictions come up in every conversation. Taking a young child on a shopping trip is genuinely hard. Sizing is unpredictable, so e-commerce returns run high, and each return restarts the whole cycle. Urgency is constant – a diaper running low, a last-minute birthday gift, a seasonal outfit – and none of it tolerates a two-day SLA. Early parenting collides with peak career intensity, usually in nuclear households with no extended support. And the assortment itself is unforgiving: apparel, shoes and toys need depth across sizes, fits, fabrics, colours, occasions and age bands.

Neither existing channel resolves this. E-commerce is too slow at the core: selection sits in vendor warehouses and gets drop-shipped, taking days to arrive and as long again to be picked up. For a mother short on time, those timelines are workable but never good. Offline is fast, but expensive in the currency that actually binds – leave the kids at home, fight traffic, find parking, browse a limited shelf, come back. All for a purchase she’ll repeat in a few weeks.

So the category sits in an awkward middle. Parents either absorb the friction of offline or tolerate the delays of e-commerce and never-ending catalogues.

Why Quick Commerce Works Here

The usual objection to quick commerce is that it demands premium the customer won’t pay. We think that reads the category wrong.

Speed removes cost here rather than adding it. Returns and RTOs largely happen because the customer has a multi-day window to reconsider or find something better. Collapse that window to an hour and the leakage – along with the working capital tied up behind it – mostly disappears. Instant returns also tend to encourage a larger basket, not a smaller one.

More importantly, it delivers what a shop delivers without the storefront – instant gratification and the confidence of having seen the product. Quick commerce with inspection at the door reproduces both. That puts Peeko in competition with the dominant offline channel, not with e-commerce. Apparel and toys, around 70% of category spend, fit this well: both are largely unbranded and fragmented on the supply side, and both are bought on look and feel.

What Peeko Is Building

Peeko runs three dark stores in Bangalore with 25,000+ SKUs curated for the 0–6 age band and sub-60-minute delivery.

Two things apart from the try-and-buy experience that sets it apart.

Assortment is built micromarket by micromarket: About 60% of inventory is standardised across stores; the other 40% is planned for the specific catchment, with occasion-led buying around birthdays, travel, school and festivals. Two Peeko stores in the same city don’t look alike.
Curation is the interface: The catalogue is organised around the child rather than the brand, with profiles that adapt as the child grows.

The first two stores gave us real confidence.

Order density & volume built quickly from a standing start
Gross margins have expanded month over month
The repeat base is compounding faster than new acquisition
The repeat mix keeps broadening: parents who come in for apparel and toys return for consumables and baby food

Trust in this category generalises quickly, and that’s what turns a fast-delivery app into a destination.

Why a Specialist Wins

We spent a long time on the competitive question. Every incumbent runs into a constraint Peeko doesn’t.

Horizontal quick commerce is shelf-constrained by a generalised dark store, carrying 40–50 apparel SKUs against Peeko’s 25,000+. Horizontal e-commerce is a search-and-sort experience built for considered purchases; in our conversations, parents used it to benchmark price rather than as a first stop. Vertical e-commerce is the most credible competition, but faces the inverse problem – a legacy footprint, a multi-hour delivery promise, and an experience a new generation of parents increasingly finds cluttered and impersonal.

Depth in a fragmented supply base is hard to build and harder to copy. Put it alongside inspection at home and the trust that comes with genuine specialisation, and you get an advantage no existing player is operationally positioned to replicate soon.

Why We Backed This Team

Categories like this are won on operating rigour, not insight alone. What convinced us about Chetan, Vivek and Abhijit is that each has done a version of this before.

Chetan Sharma (CEO) spent a decade in consumer internet, building LeapScholar from zero to $12M in revenue as a day-one employee and managing teams of 500+ through multiple pivots. Vivek Khetan (COO) brings full P&L ownership: at OYO he scaled the US footprint from 39 to 300 properties, then took over the declining German business as MD & CEO and returned it to 25% topline growth. Abhijit Gairola (CTO) has fifteen years of building systems that carry real load – gaming platforms at ~10M MAU, lending infrastructure processing ₹100 Cr in monthly disbursements, and cross-border payments handling $50M a month at Skydo.

The Road Ahead

At Chiratae we’ve spent more than a decade backing the companies that formalised Indian consumer categories, from Myntra in fashion to Lenskart in eyewear to FirstCry in baby and kids. Each taught us the same thing: the winner is rarely the fastest or the cheapest, but the one that rethinks what buying should feel like for a specific customer with a specific need.

That’s what Peeko is doing for the Indian parent. What starts as rapid commerce is designed to become more – personalisation that grows with the child, an AI-led parenting companion, and a community a parent comes back to even when she isn’t shopping. Being the first app a parent opens is a valuable position to hold.

We’re delighted to partner with Chetan, Vivek, Abhijit and the Peeko team, alongside our friends at Stellaris Venture Partners, as they build the destination platform for India’s next generation of parents.

If you’re building in consumer and want to talk, reach out at anoop@chiratae.com and samarth@chiratae.com

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