Eternal, the parent firm of Zomato and Blinkit, is looking to launch its privacy-focused artificial intelligence (AI) platform, Dark.AI, globally by the end of 2026. In the company’s shareholders’ letter for Q2FY27, Eternal founder Deepinder Goyal said the platform is being developed for users who want to explore sensitive questions, conduct research and discuss confidential ideas with AI without concerns about their conversations being accessed by third parties.
“Dark is built for power users – founders, researchers, scientists, enterprises and governments – who want to keep their thoughts private, because privacy is essential for competitiveness. On top of privacy, we have fine-tuned our models to give you the absolute best quality of answers we have seen from any LLM… Dark will launch globally, hopefully within 2026,” Goyal wrote.
The shareholders’ letter stated that Dark will use fine-tuned frontier open-weight AI models running on Eternal’s own infrastructure, alongside end-to-end encryption and an encrypted memory management layer controlled by users. Goyal said the platform is designed so that the company cannot read users’ conversations.
Commenting on the impact of AI on Eternal’s own businesses, Goyal said that AI agents pose a limited threat to Zomato and Blinkit, arguing that the two businesses’ fulfilment infrastructure gives them an edge over platforms that primarily facilitate transactions.
Addressing concerns that AI agents could become the default interface for online commerce, Goyal said the risk of disintermediation varied across businesses. While District, Eternal’s going-out platform covering restaurant discovery, reservations and event ticketing, faces medium-to-high risk, Zomato and Blinkit are better positioned because they control the infrastructure required to fulfil orders.
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He argued that food ordering is largely driven by discovery, with consumers spending time browsing menus and images rather than simply looking to complete a transaction. According to the company’s internal consumer surveys, more than 65 per cent of Zomato app opens are exploratory, with users browsing an average of 12 menus and over 100 food images before placing an order.
“The prevailing narrative is simplistic: agents will become the default commerce interface, and platforms that fail to adapt will be disintermediated,” Goyal said. “Users taking time to order food is not a bug on Zomato, it is a feature,” he added.
Goyal added that food delivery and quick commerce depend on real-time coordination between restaurants, delivery partners, inventory systems and payments, making them harder to disintermediate than businesses that primarily aggregate existing supply. “The further the transaction is from real-time, multi-party coordination, the easier it is to disintermediate,” he said.