Dazo
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Dazo was a Bangalore-based food-tech startup founded by Shashaank Shekhar Singhal and Monica Rastogi. It launched in October 2014 as TapCibo, an internet-first kitchen with its own chefs, and rebranded as Dazo in April 2015 after pivoting to a mobile-only aggregator of select restaurants. The app offered 8-10 curated lunch and dinner items orderable in three taps, with Dazo handling last-mile delivery, serving areas such as Indira Nagar, Koramangala and Bagmane Tech Park at a claimed 150 orders a day.
02 / Dazo FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Dazo shut down because it could not survive India's hyper-competitive food delivery market. It competed against heavily funded players such as TinyOwl, Zomato, Swiggy and FoodPanda, which had far deeper pockets and were burning cash on discounts to buy customers and scale. With limited funding and rising operational costs, Dazo's curated, small-scale model could not sustain itself, and the team decided to wind up the business after about a year of operations.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
The retained source record identifies the company as having ended operations; the exact event details remain unverified.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
In October 2014, Shashaank Shekhar Singhal and Monica Rastogi founded TapCibo in Bangalore as an internet-first kitchen with its own chefs.
- 02
In April 2015, the company rebranded as Dazo, pivoting to a mobile-only aggregator of select partner restaurants, and raised an undisclosed seed round from angels including Google India MD Rajan Anandan, Amazon India chief Amit Agarwal and CommonFloor co-founder Sumit Jain.
- 03
Dazo scaled to a claimed 150 orders a day across several Bangalore localities, competing with TinyOwl, Zomato, Swiggy and FoodPanda.
- 04
In October 2015, about a year after launch, the team shut Dazo down; CEO Singhal said the team had decided to move on to a new product. No bankruptcy filing was reported. No reliable loss figure was disclosed, so no loss amount is recorded.