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.

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.

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.

When OpenAI launched GPT-5 last week, the company said the model would simplify the ChatGPT experience. OpenAI hoped GPT-5 would act as a sort of “one size fits all” AI model with a router that would automatically decide how to best answer user questions. The company said this unified approach would eliminate the need for users to navigate its model picker — a long, complicated menu of AI options that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has publicly said he hates.

But it looks like GPT-5 is not the unified AI model OpenAI hoped it would be.

Altman said in a post on X Tuesday that the company introduced new “Auto”, “Fast”, and “Thinking” settings for GPT-5 that all ChatGPT users can select from the model picker. The Auto setting seems to work like GPT-5’s model router that OpenAI initially announced; however, the company is also giving users options to circumnavigate it, allowing them to access fast and slow responding AI models directly.

Alongside GPT-5’s new modes, Altman said that paid users can once again access several legacy AI models — including GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, and o3 — which were deprecated just last week. GPT-4o is now in the model picker by default, while other AI models can be added from ChatGPT’s settings.

“We are working on an update to GPT-5’s personality which should feel warmer than the current personality but not as annoying (to most users) as GPT-4o,” Altman wrote in the post on X. “However, one learning for us from the past few days is we really just need to get to a world with more per-user customization of model personality.”

ChatGPT’s model picker now seems to be as complicated as ever, suggesting that GPT-5’s model router has not universally satisfied users as the company hoped. The expectations for GPT-5 were sky high, with many hoping that OpenAI would push the limits of AI models like it had with the launch of GPT-4. However, GPT-5’s rollout has been rougher than expected.

The deprecation of GPT-4o and other AI models in ChatGPT sparked a backlash among users who had grown attached to the AI models’ responses and personalities in ways that OpenAI had not anticipated. In the future, Altman says the company will give users plenty of advance notice if it ever deprecates GPT-4o.

GPT-5’s model router also appeared to be largely broken on launch day. That caused some users to feel the AI model wasn’t as performant as previous OpenAI models, and forced Altman to address the problem in an AMA session on Reddit. However, it seems that GPT-5’s router may still not be satisfying for all users.

“We’re not always going to get everything on try #1 but I am very proud of how quickly the team can iterate,” wrote OpenAI’s VP of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, in a post on X Tuesday.

Routing prompts to the right AI model is a difficult task that requires aligning an AI model to a user’s preferences, as well as the specific question they’re asking. The router then has to make a decision on which AI model to send the prompt to in just a split second — that way, if a prompt goes to a fast responding AI model, the response can still be fast.

More broadly, some people exhibit preferences for AI models that go beyond fast or slow responses. Some users may like the verbosity of one AI model, while others might appreciate the contrarian answers of another.

Human attachment to certain AI models is a relatively new concept that isn’t well understood. For example, hundreds of people in San Francisco recently held a funeral for Anthropic’s AI model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, when it was taken offline. In other cases, AI chatbots seem to be contributing to mentally unstable people going down psychotic rabbit holes.

It seems OpenAI has more work to do around aligning its AI models to individual user preferences.