Eternal’s Dark.ai: the Zomato parent bets on an AI assistant that ‘cannot read your conversations’

• Who: Eternal Limited, the parent company of Zomato and Blinkit; announcement by founder and Vice Chairman Deepinder Goyal.
• What: Dark.ai — a privacy-first AI assistant with end-to-end encryption and a user-controlled encrypted memory layer.
• Models: fine-tuned frontier open-weight models running inside Eternal’s own infrastructure — not third-party clouds.
• When: revealed in the Q2 FY27 shareholders’ letter on October 21, 2026; global launch “hopefully within 2026” — no firm date.
• Quality claim: Goyal says Dark’s models give “the absolute best quality of answers we have seen from any LLM” (benchmarks promised soon) and are trained to “tell you what they think is the truth.”
• Quarter behind it: Q2 FY27 net profit of ₹125 crore (vs ₹65 crore a year earlier) and revenue from operations of ₹24,138 crore (vs ₹13,590 crore).

The food-delivery giant that taught India to order dinner in ten minutes wants to talk to you about privacy. Eternal Limited, the parent company of Zomato and Blinkit, plans to launch a privacy-first AI assistant called Dark.ai globally by the end of 2026, founder Deepinder Goyal revealed in the company’s Q2 FY27 shareholders’ letter on Wednesday, October 21.

It is the company’s boldest move yet beyond its core businesses — and a direct attack on the business model of every mainstream AI assistant that trains on, logs, or mines your conversations.

A food-delivery giant walks into AI

Eternal — formerly known as Zomato — used the same shareholders’ letter to report another quarter of fast growth. Net profit for the July–September quarter came in at ₹125 crore, up from ₹65 crore a year earlier, while revenue from operations rose to ₹24,138 crore from ₹13,590 crore, according to figures carried by TradingView. The board also approved consolidating the Going-out India business into a single wholly owned subsidiary, Zomato Entertainment Private Limited, via a slump sale — part of an internal restructuring.

The Dark.ai reveal was tucked into that same letter, and Goyal gave it the kind of personal framing founders reserve for products they actually want built. “I wanted an AI which I could talk to without being judged, without any fear, and without leaving a trace,” he wrote.

The pitch: privacy as the feature

The technical architecture is the whole sales pitch. “Dark uses fine-tuned frontier open-weight models, running inside our own infrastructure. End-to-end encryption. We cannot read your conversations, even if we are forced to,” Goyal wrote in the letter, as reported by The Hindu BusinessLine.

Context carries across sessions through an encrypted memory-management layer that the user controls — so the assistant remembers your work without the provider holding the plaintext. Eternal says its team has already been testing the product internally for several months.

Goyal promoted the launch on X with the teaser “from the house of Eternal. Coming soon,” according to letsdatascience.com. The framing is explicit: “The uncertainty and the lack of trust we have with large AI companies limits the power of AI in our lives,” he wrote.

Who it’s for — and a big claim about quality

Dark is not pitched at casual users. “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,” Goyal wrote.

Then comes the swagger. On top of privacy, Goyal says the company has fine-tuned its models to give “the absolute best quality of answers we have seen from any LLM” — with benchmarks to be revealed soon — and that the models are trained “to not please you, and tell you what they think is the truth.” That anti-sycophancy line is a deliberate shot at one of the most criticized traits of today’s chatbots. Whether the benchmarks materialize is the first thing worth watching.

Agentic commerce, on the side

The letter also offered Goyal’s read on the agent wave threatening delivery economics. He placed Blinkit and Zomato in the “low-risk zone” against agentic commerce — arguing they “might even benefit from partial market share capture by agents in these categories” — while the company’s District going-out business sits in the “medium-to-high risk zone.”

‘Hopefully within 2026’

There is no firm launch date yet — just “Dark will launch globally, hopefully within 2026.” The announcement raises real questions it does not answer: which open-weight base models Eternal fine-tuned, how independent audits would verify the encryption claims, and how a privacy-first product from a data-hungry consumer giant squares with its core business. But as a market signal it is loud — one of India’s biggest consumer tech companies now treats distrust of Big AI as a product category worth building for.