Swiggy’s Evolution: From a Logistics Firm to the Leading Food Delivery Giant
History
In 2013, Sriharsha Majety and Nandan Reddy embarked on the entrepreneurial journey and established Bundl Technologies, a logistics service. Bundl was shut down a year after its inception, which, regrettably, did not prove to be a success. They came back with a company proposal after giving it some serious thought, but this time it was in the food sector.
Rahul Jaimini created an online meal ordering and delivery app as a result. From software and databases to the user-interface and functionality, he was in charge of everything. The company had to prepare for some competition when the app went live in a small area because of Foodpanda and Ola Café. At the inception of Swiggy’s operations, they had just six delivery boys and a roster of over 20 eateries. It was only reasonable at this time to be unable to tell a good restaurant from a bad one. Consequently, the team exclusively opted for reputable dining establishments that didn’t provide in-house delivery services.
They then collaborated with a few eateries, and for the ones who baulked, the founders took the food deliveries home, snapped photos of them, and put them on Swiggy. With only a website and no mobile application as of April 2015, there was virtually no customer traction. In any case, they had to travel to the well-known food alley in Koramangala near Jyoti Nivas College and hand out flyers to the patrons of the restaurants.
The knowledge regarding Swiggy was spread among the internal groups at the time by a friend of Shriharsha who was employed with Flipkart. Swiggy experienced its first taste of scalability the following day when the website had about 35 users. It gained traction as a result of word-of-mouth and returning users. Restaurants finally began to take notice of Swiggy as they were losing their own business otherwise.
As a result, Swiggy had to distribute countless flyers to the proprietors of these restaurants so they could promote the service to their out-of-town clients. The wheels at Swiggy began to turn more quickly over time. The team’s only members up until December 2014 were Nandan, Sriharsha, Rahul, and a few delivery partners. The three people shared the work. In addition to helping the delivery partners navigate the Koramangala streets, Nandan would handle sales, customer success, and firefighting.
The deliveries—more than 100 in total—would be made by Shriharsha himself. The group would transform the physical menus from the eateries into excel files. As there was less data available, the trustworthy statistic showed how frequently a small number of users continued to use Swiggy and eat out. This was regarded as proof positive that the product was viable and had found a market.
The Founders’ Profile: Sriharsha Majety, Nandan Reddy, and Rahul Jain founded Swiggy.
Sriharsha Majety –
He serves as Swiggy’s co-founder and CEO. He graduated from BITS Pilani with a BE in Electrical and Electronics Engineering and an M.Sc. in Physics in 2008. Sri Harsha also passed level II of the CFA programme at the CFA Institute. After that, he completed his MBA in Finance at IIM, Calcutta, and earned his degree there in 2011. He only obtained his position as a recruitment coordinator here. He also worked on the rates trading desk at Nomura International in London. He co-founded Bundl Technologies Pvt. Ltd. in 2013, and Swiggy was launched afterwards.
Dr. Lakshmi Nandan Reddy
This founder of Swiggy, like his business partner Majety, graduated from BITS Pilani. He earned his M.Sc. from that institution in 2010. As a result, the team chose to dine exclusively at well-established restaurants that did not offer in-house delivery services. He was a founding member of the restaurant Zurna in Hyderabad. He eventually collaborated with Majety to develop Bundl Technologies, which later served as the basis for Swiggy.
Richard Jaimini –
Another engineer, Rahul Jaimini, completes the third component of this magnificent triad! He graduated from IIT Kharagpur in 2010 with a double major in computer science and engineering. When Majety and Nandan asked him to help create the great Swiggy application, he was working as a software engineer at Myntra.
Funding and Acquisition
Swiggy secured a $2 million investment from Accel and SAIF Partners in 2015, as well as further funding from Norwest Venture Partners. It raised $15 million the next year from both former and new investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners and Harmony Partners. Swiggy had a $80 million investment round led by Naspers in 2017. Swiggy was valued at approximately $3.3 billion in September 2018, and approximately $3.6 billion in April 2020.
In 2017, Swiggy bought Asian food startup 48East from Bangalore. Later, Mumbai-based food and apparel delivery firm Scootsy Logistics was purchased by Swiggy, which ultimately shut it down. In September 2018, it acquired Mumbai-based milk delivery start-up SuprDaily. The business made a 31-crore investment in Mumbai-based ready-to-eat food manufacturer Fingerlix in 2019. Swiggy’s valuation increases to $10.7 billion in January 2022 as a result of a $700 million fundraise coordinated by US asset management Invesco
