Why Dazo Couldn’t Scale: A Case Study in Food-Tech Fragility

✍ By Sarthak Jain | 🌍 India | 📅 Wed Oct 22 2025

Why Dazo Couldn’t Scale: A Case Study in Food-Tech Fragility

Originally a mobile only app for ordering food online called Tapcibo, Dazo started in 2015 and received a great response. The startup initially received funding from prominent investors like Amit Agarwal (Amazon India chief), Rajan Anandan (Google India chief), Sumit Jain (Commonfloor founder), Aprameya Radhakrishna (TaxiForSure founder), and Alok Goel (former FreeCharge chief executive). But still luck didn’t favour the company as the online food ordering market had already got saturated by emergence of players like Zomato, Swiggy and Tinyowl. This created a much expected price war among all and those with greater penetration, higher customer satisfaction and high quality technology survived the clash. Running any kind of business requires a lot of courage and commitment other than having engineering and management skills. Even a tiniest sense of self doubt can turn the tables against your favour. Competition is a universal truth that everyone has to face in some segment of his life but, embracing your failure or success against it in the right way helps in the ultimate growth. Funds deficit, slow expansion and high customer acquisition costs ultimately made the new born startup to close down it’s operations in 2016.