Action in the online food ordering and delivery segment in India is gaining momentum. The startup has received funding of $100 million from Naspers and a Chinese company Meituan-Dianping.
While Naspers is a South African conglomerate with global footprints across many verticals, the latter is an ecommerce firm operating in China. With thisround, the total funds raised by Swiggy goes up to $255 million.
With this new funding, Swiggy will further introduce a host of unique and advanced products and services. As part of its long-term strategy of solving for existing supply gaps in the marketplace, Swiggy will also make investments in its New Supply business line.
As part of this new initiative, Swiggy has an offering called Swiggy access. Within this, Swiggy is able to offer real kitchen space for restaurants to prepare their dishes and distribute them to their customers.
As per a statement from the company, Swiggy will also continue innovating its core technology platform, especially in the areas of data-driven self-learning systems that leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence. The company will build on its adaptive, real-time prediction and optimisation systems to further improve consumer choice and personalisation, along with speed, volume and efficiency of deliveries.
“As India’s leading food ordering and delivery platform with a network of thousands of restaurants and millions of users, Swiggy has become part of consumers’ everyday lives. We want to continue to bring convenience, choice and reliability to our users as we fulfil our mission of ‘Changing the Way India Eats. With this funding, we will further invest in building differentiated offerings, plugging the white spaces in the ecosystem, and developing our technology while keeping superlative customer experience at the core,” Sriharsha Majety, CEO, Swiggy said in a statement.
It may be recalled that the last time Swiggy raised $80 million also, Naspers had participated. The other investors in Swiggy include Harmony Partners, Accel Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Softbank’s SAIF Partners.
“Swiggy has continued strong growth through 2017 and now has a clear lead in the market. The company’s performance is all the more impressive given the intense competition we see in the food ordering and delivery business in India. Swiggy has shown it has the ability to rise above the competition and create long-term relationships with its users,” said Larry Illg, CEO, Naspers Ventures.
Swiggy currently has a presence across Delhi, NCR, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Chennai, Ahmedabad and Chandigarh. It also recently acquired a startup in related gourmet food space, 48East. It also claims to have posted a record increase of 500% in revenues in the last financial year and saw order volumes nearly double since its previous funding in May 2017.
The food ordering and delivery market, worldwide, is projected to grow very rapidly in the coming years and the fact that an investment leader like Naspers has committed over $1 billion to the sector can be seen as a clear indication of this expectation.
The food-tech segment has been seeing immense momentum over the past year with new players such as UberEATS entering the segment and incumbents such as Zomato also growing aggressively, having raised $200 million from Alibaba’s Ant Financial. Ola too, seems to be betting big on the segment with its acquisition of FoodPanda.