Bessemer leads fresh fundingin Swiggy

Bengaluru: Online food ordering and delivery platform

Swiggy

has raised $15 million (Rs 100 crore) in a

Series D

funding round led by

Bessemer

Venture Partners. Most of the existing investors also participated in the round.

With this, Swiggy, which competes with Zomato, Foodpanda and Runnr, has to date raised nearly $76 million. Earlier this year, it raised $42 million from New York-based Harmony Partners and Singapore-based RB Investors, along with existing investors Norwest Venture Partners, SAIF Partners and Accel Partners.

The company plans to use the fresh funds to improve technology and ramp up its senior leadership by hiring across marketing, product and design. “We are present across eight cities, and we plan to expand and strengthen our foothold there before venturing out to new geographies. Since we are a technology company, we are planning to sharpen our capabilities and invest heavily in deep technology and machine learning,” said Sriharsha Majety, who started Swiggy together with Nandan Reddy and Rahul Jaimini in 2014.

Majety declined to disclose the valuation in the latest round, but said it was 10% higher than in the previous round. He said the company will be profitable in Bengaluru and Hyderabad within three to six months.

The company says it is the fastest delivery platform with an average delivery time of 37 minutes. New age delivery companies are using large-scale analytics to predict where orders could be coming from and allocating resources accordingly to improve efficiencies. But most are still subsidizing customers by not fully charging for the cost of delivery.

Competitor TinyOwl could not sustain operations and in June, merged with Roadrunnr, a last-mile delivery venture, to form Runnr, a food ordering and delivery platform.

Vishal Gupta, MD at Bessemer Venture Partners, said Swiggy’s “full-stack approach coupled with great execution has resulted in unparalleled customer experience, retention and business economics”.Swiggy has 9,000 restaurants listed on its platform. Majety said the company touched 1 million orders in April, and expects to do 100,000 orders a day in two months — approximately triple of what was seen in April.


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