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Rapido, a popular ride-hailing platform in India, has quietly begun beta testing its food delivery service in Bengaluru, marking its first serious move to challenge market leaders Swiggy and Zomato in one of the world’s fastest-growing delivery markets.

The 10-year-old startup has started testing its food delivery service in three primary localities in the southern city of Bengaluru, namely Byrasandra, Tavarekere, and Madiwala (BTM) Layout, Hosur Sarjapura Road (HSR) Layout, and Koramangala, Rapido co-founder and CEO Aravind Sanka confirmed to TechCrunch.

Rapido created a wholly owned subsidiary Ctrlx Technologies to launch its food delivery service, named Ownly. The subsidiary lists Sanka and Rapido vice president of finance Vivek Krishna as the directors, per the regulatory filings reviewed by TechCrunch.

Sanka said there was no specific reason for setting up the subsidiary. However, it may be a strategic move to avoid potential conflicts of interest with Swiggy, which currently holds a 12% minority stake in the ride-hailing startup.

Swiggy recently confirmed in a letter to shareholders that it would reevaluate its investment in Rapido, citing a potential conflict of interest “that may arise in the future.”

Meanwhile, Rapido’s Ownly has also released its Android app on Google Play that offers food from nearby restaurants at around 15% lower prices than those on Swiggy and Zomato.

Rapido’s Ownly Food delivery app.Image Credits:Ownly

The lower pricing is a result of Rapido’s model of not taking commissions from restaurants, which are up to 30% in the case of other food delivery apps, including Swiggy and Zomato, and instead charging a fixed fee per order. The startup mentioned its fixed-fee approach in a proposal to restaurants in June.

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Rapido has a fleet of around 10 million vehicles, including 5 to 6 million two-wheelers, across India, a person familiar with the startup’s business told TechCrunch recently. The company is using its two-wheeler fleet to deliver food — alongside offering its taxi and courier services.

Rapido will avoid showing restaurants located far from customers to reduce fuel costs and delivery times, and will curate menu items on its app to maximize margins while offering enough discoverability, a Rapido investor told TechCrunch on condition of anonymity.

While handling deliveries for Swiggy, Rapido gained insight into peak hours and high-demand restaurants — the data it would now leverage for its own food delivery service, the investor said.

The agreement with Swiggy does not prevent Rapido from using this data, although it does prohibit the startup from entering into contracts with Zomato or other competitors, the investor added.

Founded in 2015, Rapido began as a bike taxi aggregator before expanding into auto rickshaws, parcel delivery, and third-party logistics. In 2023, it entered the cab business to take on Uber and local rival Ola. The startup gained traction in this segment with its subscription-based model, positioning it as an alternative to the commission-based approach used by its competitors.

Rapido also partnered with Taiwanese battery-swapping electric two-wheeler maker Gogoro to deploy its vehicles as bike taxis. Moreover, the recent moves helped the startup boost its valuation and become a unicorn last year.

India’s online food delivery market is projected to surpass ₹2 trillion (approximately $23 billion) by 2030, per a report by Bain & Company and Swiggy released last year. Zomato currently leads the market with a 58% share, according to brokerage firm Motilal Oswal, while Swiggy holds the remaining 42%, per Bernstein. Uber was also among the early players in the space with Uber Eats, which it sold to Zomato in early 2020.

So far, Rapido has raised $574 million in 13 rounds, per Tracxn. It operates in more than 250 cities and handles over 3.5 million rides daily. The startup counts Prosus, WestBridge Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, and Think Investments, among its key investors.

OpenAI is launching a new general purpose AI agent in ChatGPT, which the company says can complete a wide variety of computer-based tasks on behalf of users. OpenAI says the agent can automatically navigate a user’s calendar, generate editable presentations and slideshows, and run code.

The tool, called ChatGPT agent, combines several capabilities from OpenAI’s previous agentic tools, including Operator’s ability to click around on websites, as well as Deep Research’s ability to synthesize information from dozens of websites into a concise research report. OpenAI says users will be able to interact with the agent simply by prompting ChatGPT in natural language.

On Thursday, OpenAI is rolling out ChatGPT agent for subscribers to its Pro, Plus, and Team plans. To activate the tool, users can select “agent mode” in ChatGPT’s dropdown menu of tools.

The launch of ChatGPT agent represents OpenAI’s boldest attempt yet to turn ChatGPT into an agentic product that can take actions and offload tasks for users, rather than just answering questions. In recent years, Silicon Valley companies including OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity have unveiled dozens of AI agents that have promised to do just that. However, these early version of AI agents have proven to struggle with complex tasks, and seem less compelling as products than the ultimate vision tech executives pitch around AI agents.

That said, OpenAI says ChatGPT agent is far more capable than its previous offerings.

OpenAI’s new agent can access ChatGPT connectors, allowing users to connect apps like Gmail and GitHub so that the agent can find relevant information to your prompts. Furthermore, OpenAI says ChatGPT agent has access to a terminal, and can use APIs to access certain apps.

The model underlying ChatGPT agent offers state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks, according to OpenAI.

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The company says the ChatGPT agent model scores 41.6% on Humanity’s Last Exam (pass@1), a difficult test made up of thousands of questions across more than one hundred subjects. That’s roughly double what OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini scored on the test.

On FrontierMath, one of the hardest known math benchmarks, OpenAI says ChatGPT agent scores 27.4% when it has access to tools, such as a terminal for code execution. The previous state-of-the-art score comes from o4-mini, which scored just 6.3%.

OpenAI notes that it developed ChatGPT agent with safety in mind, largely because the product presents some newfound capabilities that could make it more dangerous in the hands of a bad actor. How capable ChatGPT agent truly is, however, remains to be seen.