Eternal’s Enterprise AI Turn: Why The Zomato Parent Spun Out Nugget

Eternal’s AI venture Nugget has quietly pulled off a surprise even by Blinkit or Zomato’s standards.

Nugget, an enterprise AI platform from Eternal, is a 1.5-year-old venture that closes one enterprise deal a week on average, with zero rupees spent on ads, marketing or sponsorships, according to an earlier LinkedIn post by Nugget’s head, Dushyant Garg.

While investors have largely associated Eternal’s AI ambitions with food delivery, quick commerce and B2B supplies, Nugget has quietly become a standalone business in its own right.

Initially developed to solve customer support and sales problems within Zomato, Nugget has evolved into an AI platform that sells conversational AI, voice assistants, workflow automation and agentic AI solutions to external enterprises.

Its customers now span large private banks, insurance companies, retail brands, D2C businesses, manufacturing companies, epharmacy platforms and, perhaps most surprisingly, Zomato’s biggest food delivery rival Swiggy.

This comes at a time when several consumer internet companies are attempting to convert years of operational expertise into AI-powered enterprise software businesses. Companies that once built technology solely to power their own consumer platforms are increasingly packaging those capabilities into products for other enterprises.

Payments giant Paytm, for instance, has outlined plans to embed AI across merchant services and financial products, while fintech unicorn Razorpay has unveiled Agentic Commerce and Agent Studio, betting that autonomous AI agents will become integral to how millions of merchants interact with customers and conduct business.

Eternal now sees an opportunity to commercialise these capabilities for other enterprises, and that ambition has become increasingly visible in recent quarters.

In its Q1 FY27 shareholder letter, Eternal disclosed that Nugget’s FY26 revenue stood at ₹7.2 Cr within the first year of its launch, signalling that what began as an internal experiment has started contributing some revenue, even though this is a drop in the bucket given Eternal’s group revenue of more than ₹20,211 Cr .

The company has also undertaken a structural shift. Nugget has been spun out into a separate legal entity under a new parent company, Carthero Technologies Private Limited (CTPL), via a slump sale for ₹35 Cr.

“We realised the technology had matured beyond solving our own problems,” said Garg, who heads Nugget. “Once we had built AI systems that were delivering measurable business outcomes internally, the natural next step was to make those capabilities available to other enterprises,” he told Inc42 in an exclusive interaction.

For Eternal, the move represents more than product diversification. It is an attempt to build an entirely new business category that could eventually sit alongside food delivery and quick commerce as another long-term growth engine. Garg did not rule out the possibility of a separate fundraise for Nugget going forward.

The question now is whether an AI platform born inside one of India’s largest consumer internet companies can evolve into a credible enterprise software player in an increasingly crowded AI market.

From Solving Zomato’s Problems To Selling AI

Nugget’s origins are rooted in a problem familiar to every fast-growing consumer internet company: customer support at scale.

As Zomato’s food delivery business expanded across hundreds of cities, the company found itself handling millions of customer interactions every month.

“At the same time, its sales teams were constantly engaging restaurant partners to onboard merchants, resolve operational issues and pitch advertising products. These repetitive, high-volume interactions created an ideal testing ground for artificial intelligence,” Garg said.

“We started by solving our own operational challenges,” he added. “Customer support was an obvious use case, but there were also several sales and merchant-facing workflows where AI could significantly improve efficiency.”

Over time, Nugget’s AI stack evolved beyond simple chatbots. Instead of merely answering customer queries, the platform began deploying conversational voice agents capable of handling complex interactions, AI-powered sales assistants that could engage restaurant partners, and workflow automation tools that reduced manual intervention across multiple business functions within Eternal.

The breakthrough, according to Garg, came when the technology reached an inflection point internally.

“We reached a stage where the AI wasn’t just reducing costs — it was consistently delivering measurable business outcomes. That’s when we realised the platform could solve similar problems for enterprises outside Eternal.”

That realisation marked the beginning of Nugget’s transition from an internal technology platform to a commercial AI business in February 2025.

Today, the company offers a growing suite of enterprise AI products spanning conversational AI, voice assistants, agentic AI systems and workflow automation, with deployments tailored to individual industries rather than generic AI applications.

Rather than positioning itself as another horizontal AI platform, Nugget is building specialised AI agents for enterprise workflows. Its customer base already spans retail brands, D2C companies, financial institutions, manufacturing businesses and healthcare platforms, with each deployment designed around specific operational challenges.

Financial services, Garg said, has emerged as one of Nugget’s fastest-growing opportunities.

“Retail and D2C continue to be our largest customer segments today. But financial services are seeing very rapid adoption because the number of workflows that can be automated using AI is enormous,” he said.

Among its newer customers is one of India’s largest private insurance companies, where Nugget has deployed AI agents to assist field sales executives. Instead of replacing human insurance agents, the platform acts as an intelligent assistant, helping sales representatives answer customer queries, retrieve policy information, generate leads and improve conversion rates by reducing the time spent on repetitive administrative tasks.

The broader opportunity, Garg believes, lies in augmenting rather than replacing frontline employees. Across lending, insurance and banking, AI agents can support relationship managers, loan officers and sales executives by surfacing relevant information instantly, automating documentation and streamlining customer interactions. The result is faster turnaround times, improved productivity and higher sales efficiency without requiring enterprises to fundamentally alter their workforce structures.

That philosophy extends across industries. For manufacturing companies, Nugget has developed AI agents capable of monitoring factory operations and identifying technical anomalies before they escalate into operational failures. In healthcare and epharmacy, conversational AI agents are being used to reconnect with customers who abandon online purchases, understand the reasons behind incomplete transactions and improve order conversions through personalised engagement.

These are markedly different use cases from the customer support chatbots that dominated enterprise AI conversations just a few years ago.

The company’s own experience inside Eternal continues to shape many of these products. One of Nugget’s earliest internal successes came from deploying conversational voice agents to support Zomato’s advertising sales teams. Restaurants exploring advertising products on the platform could interact with AI-powered sales agents that answered questions, guided merchants through campaign options and reduced the need for manual intervention.

According to Garg, these deployments delivered measurable improvements in sales conversion while simultaneously lowering customer acquisition costs. Those learnings have since become reusable products that Nugget now sells to external enterprises.

Perhaps the strongest validation of the platform’s enterprise ambitions, however, comes from an unlikely customer. 

According to Garg, Swiggy — Eternal’s biggest competitor in food delivery — has also adopted Nugget for certain conversational AI deployments, using the technology in parts of its customer support operations to improve efficiency and reduce servicing costs.

This underlines Nugget’s larger ambition: to be viewed not as an internal tool from Eternal, but as an independent enterprise AI platform capable of serving businesses across industries — even competitors.

That ambition is now being reflected in the company’s structure as well. Nugget was recently incorporated under a separate entity, with regulatory filings valuing the business at around ₹350 Cr. While the move has fuelled speculation around a future external fundraise, Garg indicated that the company remains financially self-sufficient for now.

“We’re already cash-flow positive,” he said. “There isn’t an immediate requirement for external capital.”

Consumer Services Race To Build Enterprise AI

Nugget’s emergence is not an isolated bet.

Across India’s startup ecosystem, a growing number of consumer technology companies are attempting to convert years of operational experience into enterprise AI products or at least bolstering their own operations. Instead of building another consumer-facing chatbot, they are commercialising the software, automation tools and AI systems they originally created for their own businesses.

Industry observers say large, cash-rich consumer tech companies in India are chasing an AWS-like moment, when Amazon’s cloud business became more profitable than its core marketplace.

Paytm has taken the platform route, embedding AI across its merchant ecosystem from customer support and fraud detection to operational automation. Razorpay’s approach is more product-led, with Agentic Commerce and Agent Studio letting merchants deploy agents that handle conversations, manage payments and automate workflows with minimal human intervention. The products differ; the underlying thesis does not.

Eternal arguably possesses one of the richest operational ecosystems among India’s consumer internet companies. By the time Nugget went out to sell externally in February 2025, its AI agents were already handling more than 15 Mn support interactions a month across Zomato, Blinkit and Hyperpure.

Unlike foundation model developers competing to build the largest language models, Nugget is focusing on solving business problems that enterprises encounter every day. Its strategy is centred on deploying domain-specific AI agents capable of performing repetitive but high-value tasks — from assisting insurance sales representatives and monitoring manufacturing plants to recovering abandoned shopping carts and automating customer conversations.

“We don’t believe enterprises are looking for AI for the sake of AI,” Garg said. “They’re looking for measurable business outcomes — higher conversions, lower servicing costs, faster turnaround times and better operational efficiency.”

Garg also reasoned that Indian companies are wary of data residency issues, which gives homegrown enterprise AI firms an edge over global players.

“In a way, governance on usage of AI is critical to many companies we work with, which is why they prefer Indian AI firms as opposed to global companies,” he added.

While there are niche enterprise AI startups such as Sarvam AI and Uniphore building in the space, Garg said large consumer tech companies sit at a significant advantage because of established business relationships. There is also the distribution leverage that Eternal, and other large consumer tech companies, have over smaller AI firms.

“Currently, an enterprise AI startup’s hardest problem is distribution — getting in front of the right buyer, proving the technology at scale, and shortening the trust-building cycle that normally takes quarters of pilots and reference calls before a single contract is signed,” Garg said.

Nugget, on the other hand, has already built large-scale infrastructure for Eternal, which solves for the trust-building that competitors may struggle with.

The Next Test: Scaling Beyond Eternal’s Backyard

So far, Eternal’s AI story has been largely an in-house experiment, even as the consumer tech giant has signalled its intent to expand AI offerings at scale.

Nugget has leveraged Eternal’s AI deployments across multiple use cases as a testing ground, and has also forged a strategic partnership with OpenAI to use its models for product development and iteration.

The next phase of growth will test Nugget’s claims of building domain-specific AI agents for industries such as financial services, which are quite different from quick commerce or food delivery.

Nugget is also exploring overseas markets to build AI products for the sales, customer service and account management functions of enterprises, according to sources.

The larger question is whether Nugget can offer genuinely differentiated enterprise AI products, or simply a sales pitch tied to what it built for Eternal. Enterprise software is a fundamentally different business from consumer internet, requiring long sales cycles, deep customer relationships and continuous product development.

Yet by spinning out Nugget and taking its AI capabilities to external enterprises, Eternal has made one thing clear: it no longer sees artificial intelligence merely as a productivity tool powering Zomato or Blinkit. It is betting that AI itself can become the next business.

[Edited By Nikhil Subramaniam]

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