Swiggy, a Bangalore-India-based online food delivery service, recently announced that it raised $1 billion in a Series H round of funding led by South Africa-based Internet and media company Naspers. Tencent, Hillhouse Capital, Wellington Management, DST Global, Coatue Management, and Meituan Dianping also participated in this round.
Swiggy is able to deliver food from 50,000 restaurants and the company has a fleet of 120,000 people in India, according to VentureBeat. With this funding round, Swiggy is going to use the funding to bring more quality food brands closer to consumers and address gaps in supply through delivery-only kitchens under the “Access” initiatives for its restaurant partners. And Swiggy is going to hire additional talent and strengthen its technology.
Currently, Swiggy is available in over 50 cities in India. Some of Swiggy’s rivals include Foodpanda, Zomato, and Uber’s food delivery service. Since being founded in 2014, Swiggy raised over $1.2 billion. And now Swiggy is now valued at more than $3.3 billion, according to Economic Times.
“As we add more firepower to our vision of elevating quality of life for urban consumers by offering unparalleled convenience, our global investors also share our purpose and have made a significant investment in our future,” said Swiggy CEO Sriharsha Majety in a statement.
Of the $1 billion, Naspers contributed $660 million in this round. Swiggy is not the only company in India that Naspers invested in. Naspers also invested in OLX, PayU, BYJU, and MakeMyTrip. And Naspers sold its 11.2% stake in Indian e-commerce company Flipkart to Walmart earlier this year. Naspers also led Swiggy’s $210 million Series G round, $80 million Series F round, and $100 million Series E round.
“We have even more confidence Swiggy has the winning formula and will continue to build a leading business in the country. Swiggy has 10 times the number of orders per month since our first investment, has expanded throughout India to tier 1, 2, and 3 cities, and, most importantly, is the most-loved food delivery brand in India, providing the best service to consumers nationwide,” added Naspers CEO Larry Illg.
Swiggy was founded four years ago by Majety, Nandan Reddy and Rahul Jaimini. Prior to launching Swiggy, Majety and Reddy launched a company called Bundl in 2013, but ended up shutting it down. Jaimini brought strong technical knowledge to the idea behind Swiggy as he is a former Myntra software engineer and IIT alumni.
A number of restaurants signed up for Swiggy within the first year of launching. In 2015, Swiggy raised $2 million in funding from Accel and SAIF Partners. And then those venture capital firms invested again later that year. By 2017, Swiggy saw six times the growth in three years of launching.
One of the key differentiators is that Swiggy set up cloud kitchens, which allowed restaurant partners to set up kitchen spaces in places where they don’t operate.
This year, Swiggy focused on real-time prediction and optimization systems — which helped the company blow past the competition. And with this round of funding, Swiggy is only going to widen the gap against its competition.
