Three years ago, we wrote about the 15-minute economy. At the time, quick commerce had just begun to find its feet. But in 2025, pretty much everyone — like Urban Company, this week, for instance — wants a piece of it.

Born out of the quick commerce boom in post-pandemic India, it’s similar to the renaissance in hyperlocal delivery startups almost a decade ago now. Today, when it comes to consumer services, 15 minutes is the name of the game.

Somehow the 15-minute economy has barged its way into the mainstream, but is this a bubble or a real transition? Let’s look at it, through the lens of Urban Company’s controversial launch of ‘Insta Help’ — renamed from Insta Maids after an online backlash.

After a detour through the top stories from our newsroom:

• FAST42 Is Here: After 3 months of rigorous groundwork, Inc42 released the fourth edition of FAST42 this past week to spotlight India’s fastest-growing D2C brands, which have a consolidated revenue of INR 1,300 Cr and have created over 4,000 jobs
• Unikon’s Strange Pivot: Eight months after raising $2 Mn in funding, AI-based social media platform Unikon.ai to pivot to a D2C brand. What exactly went wrong for the startup that wanted to create a LinkedIn for the AI generation?
• TWO AI’s LLM For The East: Locking horns with the biggest LLM builders of the world in both customer-facing and enterprise AI use cases, Pranav Mistry’s TWO AI could be the answer to the question of an AI model for the east

The Bandwagon Grows

It’s going to be close to two years since Blinkit announced that it would enter the professional home services space, but so far the quick commerce platform has not done anything concrete on this front.

If we know anything from

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