ONDC Raises ₹220 Crore From Zoho, Uber, and Paytm

India's Open Commerce Network Gets Its Biggest Commercial Backing

On 12 May 2026, the board of the Open Network for Digital Commerce — widely known as ONDC — passed a resolution authorising the allotment of 2.2 crore equity shares at a face value of 100 rupees each to four investors. The first tranche of 220 crore rupees has been received: Zoho contributed 70 crore rupees as the single largest investor, Uber and Paytm each contributed 60 crore, and BSE Technologies — the technology solutions arm of BSE — contributed the remaining 30 crore. ONDC says it plans to raise a further 210 crore rupees from existing and new strategic investors in a subsequent close.

The significance of this round is not only the capital raised but who is raising it. ONDC was incubated by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade and was initially capitalised by public-sector banks and financial institutions. The May 2026 round marks the first time that major private-sector commercial enterprises — a global ride-hailing platform, India's largest domestic enterprise software company, a payments giant, and a capital-markets technology firm — have put their own balance sheets directly behind the network. This is the clearest signal yet that ONDC has transitioned from a government proof-of-concept to commercially validated infrastructure.

What ONDC Actually Is

ONDC is an open interoperability protocol for digital commerce in India — not a marketplace, but the protocol layer beneath one. The architecture functions like UPI does for payments: any buyer application can access products listed by any seller application on the network without either side needing a direct bilateral commercial relationship. Transactions are settled across a shared open API layer rather than through a single platform intermediary.

The model is built explicitly to break the commission structures that dominate India's existing e-commerce duopoly. ONDC charges no platform commission itself. Seller applications on the network typically take 2 to 3 per cent, and buyer applications take 2 to 5 per cent — putting total transaction costs in the 4 to 8 per cent range. By comparison, Amazon and Flipkart charge sellers between 15 and 30 per cent in combined commissions, fulfilment fees, and advertising costs. The margin difference is the primary driver of small-seller adoption.

As of mid-2026, the network has onboarded more than 3 lakh sellers, operates across more than 400 cities and towns, and supports more than 100 active buyer applications. The network has expanded from food and consumer goods into mobility, financial services, FMCG, and agriculture — covering a significant share of India's everyday economic activity.

ONDC 2.0: DigiCatalog, AI Discovery, and Agentic Commerce

The fundraise is described by ONDC as the foundation for ONDC 2.0, which has three stated priorities beyond the current network state.

The first is DigiCatalog: a national product cataloguing infrastructure that would allow any seller in India to list a product once and have it discoverable across every buyer application on the network through a single standardised data layer. Currently, sellers must onboard to each buyer app separately, which creates integration friction that limits multi-app reach. DigiCatalog is the architectural change that removes that barrier at scale.

The second priority is AI-powered discovery: ONDC buyer apps are already experimenting with conversational and recommendation-based search that goes beyond keyword matching. The 2.0 roadmap formalises AI discovery as a network-level capability, enabling buyer applications to surface products based on intent, context, and prior behaviour rather than static catalogue search alone.

The third priority is agentic commerce: infrastructure enabling software agents to discover, negotiate, and transact on the network autonomously. The practical use cases include automated procurement for small businesses, AI-driven product sourcing for FMCG distributors, and agent-managed inventory reordering — workflows where the buyer is not a human operating an app but a software system acting on standing instructions.

Why Uber and Zoho Are Telling Choices

Uber's participation signals ONDC's ambitions beyond consumer retail. ONDC already has an active mobility vertical, and Uber's investment suggests the company sees ONDC's open mobility layer as infrastructure it will eventually integrate with — particularly as India's open mobility regulatory framework develops. Zoho, as India's largest domestic enterprise software company, brings clear strategic alignment: ONDC's DigiCatalog and agentic commerce roadmap maps directly onto the inventory management, ERP, and CRM software that Zoho sells to small and medium businesses across India. The investors are not simply providing capital; they are signalling the commercial use cases they intend to build on top of the network.

What This Means for Businesses and Builders

For businesses selling or buying online in India, ONDC 2.0 represents an opportunity to reduce dependency on dominant marketplace platforms. The commission savings alone — 12 to 25 percentage points lower than Amazon and Flipkart — are material for sellers with thin margins. DigiCatalog, once live, would significantly reduce the integration cost of listing across multiple buyer apps, which has historically been one of the key barriers to small-seller adoption at scale.

For software teams, ONDC is infrastructure worth learning now. The network runs on open specifications and APIs, and the 2.0 roadmap creates genuine product opportunities across several categories: AI-native buyer applications that use conversational discovery ahead of the network formalising it at the protocol layer; seller applications that abstract DigiCatalog integration and make it easy for small sellers to list once and reach all buyer apps; logistics applications that compete on service quality within the open framework; and increasingly, agent-native commerce applications that automate procurement and sourcing workflows.

TechPillow has worked with businesses evaluating ONDC integrations for e-commerce, fintech, and logistics applications. The pattern is consistent: the open APIs are technically accessible, the network has crossed the threshold where buyer and seller numbers create genuine discovery value, and the 2.0 roadmap reduces the integration cost of reaching the full network.

The agentic commerce direction is worth watching most closely. As AI agents increasingly handle routine procurement, reordering, and product discovery on behalf of businesses, a network built as open infrastructure — rather than locked to a single platform — provides the right technical and commercial foundation. Building on a proprietary marketplace creates dependency on its commercial terms; building on ONDC means your application's economics depend only on your own product quality and the low, stable commissions set by the protocol.

The Bottom Line

ONDC's 220 crore rupee round from Zoho, Uber, Paytm, and BSE Technologies marks the network's transition from government experiment to commercially backed national infrastructure. With ONDC 2.0 targeting DigiCatalog, AI-native discovery, and agentic commerce, the open commerce layer is becoming material for every Indian business that buys, sells, or builds software in the country. For product teams, the window to build on ONDC before the network reaches full scale is now — the seller and buyer numbers are there, the commercial backing is there, and the roadmap points directly toward the AI-native commerce future.