Thursday, 21 June 2018

HomeBIZ WRAPCorporateStory Swiggy raises $210 million in fresh funding from Naspers, DST Global

In its biggest funding round ever, Bengaluru-based food-ordering app Swiggy raised $210 million from its existing and new investors. Existing backers, South Africa's Naspers Ltd and Russia's DST Global are among the investors in their latest round. Chinese firm, Meituan-Dianping that had participated in Swiggy's last round was also amongst the investors this time. With the latest round, Swiggy has raised total capital of $466 million. In February this year, Swiggy was valued at $700 million which is expected to leap to $1.2 billion after this round. In that case, Swiggy would become one of the fastest companies to join the Unicorn club - an honorary tag given to start-ups valued at over $1 billion.
Run by Bundl Technologies Pvt Ltd, Swiggy will use the funds to ramp up its supply network as well as to foray into new markets. In a statement, Swiggy said, "The company will also double its technology headcount to build for robust operations, deep personalization and connected supply chain systems."
Swiggy is looking at stiff competition in the online food delivery segment from its prime rival, Gurugram-based Zomato, the relatively new UberEats and Ola-owned FoodPanda. Beefing up the war chest, Zomato, too, raised $200 million earlier this year from Chinese giant Alibaba's payment affiliate Ant Financial. Zomato is currently valued at $1.1 billion.
In a statement, Swiggy CEO Sriharsha Majety said, "We're thrilled to have grown the online food delivery market in India at an exponential rate, always keeping our consumers at the helm. With this investment, we will continue to widen Swiggy's offerings, along with bolstering our capabilities and plugging the gaps in the on-demand delivery ecosystem. Continual trust from globally reputed investors strengthens our core objective of enriching the lives of our consumers and partners by making our services more convenient and hassle-free."
Sriharsha Majety, an IIM Calcutta and BITS Pilani alumnus, along with Nandan Reddy, an MSc from BITS Pilani and Rahul Jamini, an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur founded Swiggy in 2014. While many of its competitors like TinyOwl have been shut down or sold, Swiggy continued to flourish till this day when it has caught up with Zomato.
Swiggy has more than 35,000 restaurant partners on its catalogues and a massive delivery fleet of over 40,000 across 15 cities including Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata and Hyderabad.

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