Eternal has an in-house AI company that I’m pretty sure 99% of people still don’t know about.
A few years ago, Zomato’s customer support operations had become massive.
- Support costs had crossed ₹150+ crore annually
- Operations were spread across 10 different platforms
- Data was fragmented
- Even though ~60% tickets were auto-resolved, scaling support efficiently was still becoming a challenge
That’s when Deepinder Goyal reportedly asked the team a simple question:
Why are we buying customer support infrastructure at this scale instead of building our own?
That decision eventually led to 𝗡𝘂𝗴𝗴𝗲𝘁.
An AI-native customer experience platform built completely in-house.
And the crazy part is that they spent nearly 3 years building it quietly before turning it into a product.
Today, Nugget:
- Handles 15 million+ conversations every month
- Achieves ~85% query resolution rates
- Improved human agent productivity by 40%
- Reduced customer support costs from ~$20 million to ~$9 million annually
That’s not a side project anymore.
That’s operating infrastructure.
But what fascinated me most is how they built it. Nugget is not just a chatbot.
It can:
- Handle voice, chat, social and in-app support together
- Understand real-time customer context
- Route issues dynamically
- Assist human agents with recommendations and historical insights
- Automate entire customer journeys end-to-end
Essentially, Eternal built its own AI operating layer for customer support.
And now comes the second-order effect most people are missing:
- They are no longer just using it internally.
- They’ve started selling Nugget externally as an enterprise product to companies including Dot & Key and businesses across sectors like finance, hospitality and healthcare.
This is exactly how great tech companies evolve.
First, they build tools to solve their own operational pain.
Then those tools become products.
Amazon did it with AWS.
Shopify did it with commerce infrastructure.
Now Eternal seems to be doing it with AI-led customer operations.
And honestly, this also explains why Zomato rebranded itself to Eternal.
Because the company is no longer just:
a food delivery app
a quick commerce platform
a dining business
It’s slowly becoming a technology infrastructure company underneath.
Most people will continue opening Zomato to order food in 10 minutes.
Very few will notice that one of India’s biggest consumer internet companies may quietly be building enterprise AI infrastructure in the background.
And that might end up being the bigger business.