Swiggy, the food delivery startup which secured a $2 Million Series A round from SAIF and Accel Partners a couple of months back, is back into the money raising business. The startup ah now grabbed a whopping $16.5 Million Series B round, led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from Accel, SAIF and others.
Swiggy acts similar to the way Foodpanda works, by aggregating orders from nearby restaurants and then delivering them to customers. However, the startups differentiates itself from others on the logistics front.
While online food delivery continues to attract heavy investment across multiple segments, Swiggy claims that its smartphone-equipped delivery personnel and routing algorithms, differentiate it from other similar services. Moreover, Swiggy’s focus continues to remain on the logistical aspects of on-demand food ordering, an avenue which needs some real, serious thinking considering India’s growing traffic woes.
Founded in 2014, Swiggy started by initially offering its delivery services in the Koramangala neighbourhood of Bangalore. It recently started operations in Gurgaon and Hyderabad with 100 restaurants in each city and had stated plans of expanding to Mumbai, Pune and NCR region in the future.The startup plans to continue its aggressive expansion policy with the current flushing in of capital.
While Swiggy’s in-principle functioning remains similar to that of Food panda or other similar services, the startup offers certain lucrative benefits, like No Minimum order and Free Delivery for all sorts of orders. Swiggy says, that since they own a fleet of in-house delivery personnel, they hence do not have a minimum order policy and accept online payments on behalf of all its partner restaurants. And while this sounds logistically expensive at first, it obviously seems to be working Swiggy’s way.
Food delivery and hyperlocal discovery are two verticals in India’ startup scenario, which have seen immense amount of activity lately. While bigger players like FoodPanda or TinyOwl continue to expand aggressively armed with large capital, non food delivery companies like Zomato and Ola are also stepping into the business. While Zomato is currently running its services in Delhi, Ola’s Ola Cafe is also presently active in selected regions.
