Indian Food Delivery Unicorn Swiggy Raises US$113M

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Country’s largest food ordering and delivery platform Swiggy, received US$113 million from Prosus Ventures in a Series I funding round. Other investors like Meituan Dianping from China and Wellington Management Company from the U.S participated in this funding round. According to a TechCrunch report, the valuation of Swiggy is a staggering US$3.6 billion.

Swiggy was founded in 2014 and has its corporate headquarters in Bengaluru, India. It currently operates out of 100+ Indian cities. The company charges between 15-40 percent commission to restaurants on order value and customers are charged a delivery and distance fee depending on the city, distance, time of the day, and order value.

According to available data, the transaction volume of Swiggy saw a stupendous growth of about 2.5x over the past year. Swiggy’s restaurant partnership base too expanded fourfold to 160,000+ through the launching of 10,000+ new restaurants each month. Currently, the number of Swiggy’s delivery partners stands at 250,000+.

The company intends to make use of the newly raised funds to expand into new business avenues like launching new on-demand service categories and unique ventures like Cloud Kitchens. Sriharsha Majety, CEO & Co-founder of Swiggy, said that they plan to follow a “sustainable path to profitability” by way of launching new lines of business that take them closer to their plan. Swiggy plans to invest in various innovative growth areas of its services like Swiggy Go, Swiggy Stores, and Supr Daily.

The current investor Prosus previously referred to as Naspers Ventures and Food had invested in the company for the first time in the year 2017, pumping in US$80 million through Series E funding round. Again in the year 2018, Prosus led a funding round where Swiggy secured US$1 billion investment.

According to reports, last year in August, Swiggy was amid a discussion with Naspers in an attempt to raise potential funding between US$700 million and US$750 million, and Naspers was likely to inject US$350 million.

India finds itself amid terrific food delivery warfare. Last month only, Swiggy’s rival Zomato took over from Uber its food delivery operations in India.

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