Nugget, the enterprise AI venture built inside Eternal Limited — the parent company of Zomato, Blinkit, District and Hyperpure — has quietly evolved from an internal customer-support automation tool into a standalone platform now closing deals with private banks, insurance companies, direct-to-consumer brands, e-pharmacies and even rival food-delivery platform Swiggy. The trajectory places Eternal alongside Cars24, whose newly launched Deployment Inc follows an almost identical path, as one of the clearest examples yet of India's largest consumer internet platforms converting internal AI infrastructure into standalone enterprise revenue lines.
Nugget's origins trace back to February 2025, when Zomato — then still operating under its original name — unveiled the platform as an AI-powered customer support system, alongside the announcement that the parent company would rebrand from Zomato Ltd to Eternal Ltd to reflect a broader portfolio spanning food delivery, quick commerce, dining and B2B grocery supply. "We're now opening it up to businesses worldwide," founder and then-CEO Deepinder Goyal said at the time, signalling early intent to commercialise the technology well beyond Zomato's own customer support needs.
That intent has since materialised into a genuine external business. According to Inc42's reporting, Nugget now offers conversational AI, voice assistants, workflow automation and agentic systems to enterprises outside the Eternal group, closing an average of one deal a week without spending on advertising — an unusually capital-efficient growth trajectory for an enterprise software business, and one that underscores the credibility Nugget has built through Zomato's own scale as its original proving ground. Eternal has continued deepening Nugget's technical foundation through an expanded partnership with OpenAI, announced in February 2026, spanning AI deployments across Zomato, Blinkit, District, Hyperpure, the company's partner ecosystem, and Nugget itself, alongside a structured Partner Upskilling Program aimed at driving AI adoption among Eternal's restaurant and delivery partners.
The corporate structure around Nugget has also evolved. In a filing reviewed by TipRanks, Eternal's board approved a related-party transaction under which the Nugget business would move to Carthero Technologies Private Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary, for Rs 35 crore in a slump sale — a transaction the company has characterised as an arm's-length internal reorganisation intended to simplify Eternal's corporate structure and sharpen its focus on B2B AI-driven support offerings, rather than a signal of reduced ambition for the unit.
Eternal's own commentary suggests the company sees genuine strategic weight behind the restructuring rather than treating Nugget as a peripheral experiment. Management has described Nugget as currently operating "in stealth mode" from a broader market-facing perspective even as it reports "good early traction," with further detail on its long-term business thesis expected in coming quarters; current costs at the unit are described as primarily manpower-related, consistent with a business still in its scaling phase rather than one optimised purely for near-term profitability.
The strategic logic mirrors a pattern now visible across several of India's largest consumer platforms: having built sophisticated, high-volume AI operating systems to run their own businesses at scale — Zomato and Blinkit's delivery logistics, Cars24's inspection and financing workflows — these companies are increasingly betting that the operational AI expertise developed for internal use has stand-alone commercial value to enterprises that lack the scale or expertise to build similar systems from scratch. For Nugget specifically, landing a customer as directly competitive as Swiggy — a company Eternal battles daily for market share in quick commerce and food delivery — is a notable signal of the platform's technical credibility, even if it raises obvious questions about how Eternal manages potential conflicts of interest between its enterprise AI ambitions and its core consumer businesses.
Whether Nugget can scale from its current one-deal-a-week cadence into a materially sized independent revenue line for Eternal remains an open question, one the company has signalled it will address with more detail in future quarters. What is clear is that the unit's evolution — from an internal Zomato support tool, through a public product launch, an expanded OpenAI partnership, and now a formal corporate restructuring into its own subsidiary — reflects a deliberate, multi-year effort by Eternal to build genuine optionality into its AI strategy, rather than treating artificial intelligence as simply another feature layered onto its existing consumer apps.
The Rs 35 crore valuation attached to the Nugget slump sale is itself a useful marker of where the business currently stands: a figure that size reflects a unit still early in its independent commercial life, valued primarily on its technology and team rather than on meaningful standalone revenue — consistent with Eternal's own characterisation of Nugget as still operating "in stealth mode" from a market-facing perspective. That framing matters for how investors should read the unit's trajectory: closing one enterprise deal a week without advertising spend is a genuinely strong efficiency signal for an early B2B software business, but it is a very different scale of achievement from the multi-hundred-crore annualised revenue lines that would justify treating Nugget as a material contributor to Eternal's overall financial picture. The more interesting question over the next several quarters may be less about Nugget's absolute revenue and more about whether Eternal's willingness to sell AI tools to a direct competitor like Swiggy signals a broader strategic comfort with treating enterprise AI as a genuinely separate business, insulated from the competitive dynamics of its consumer platforms — a stance that, if sustained, would mark a meaningful departure from how most consumer internet companies have historically approached adjacent B2B opportunities.
