BENGALURU — Sohail Abbas calls his convenience store a cockroach, a tech industry term for profit-driven startups that survive challenging times. But lately, he’s worried that unicorns — startups valued at more than $1 billion — will eat his lunch.
Sales at his neighborhood shop in a swanky part of southern tech hub Bengaluru, not far from the sprawling offices of Microsoft and Morgan Stanley, have slumped 15% in the year through March. The 45-year-old shopkeeper blames his store’s woes on a handful of domestic startups including Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy, which are wooing upwardly mobile urban Indians with deliveries in less than 20 minutes, a speed Abbas finds hard to match.
