India-based food ordering service Swiggy has secured $700m in a series K round featuring internet groups Prosus and Smile Group, TechCrunch reported yesterday, as the country’s on-demand delivery space continues to expand.
Investment firm Invesco led the round, participating alongside financial services firms India Infoline and Kotak as well as Baron Capital Group, Sumeru Venture, Axis Growth, Sixteenth Street Capital, Ghisallo, Segantii Capital, Alpha Wave Global, Qatar Investment Authority and Ark Impact.
Prosus and India Infoline were represented by Prosus Ventures and IIFL AMC Late Stake Tech Fund respectively, and the round valued the company at $10.7bn.
Founded in 2014, Swiggy provides a machine learning-equipped on-demand delivery platform that enables users to order food from hundreds of thousands of local restaurants across some 500 Indian cities. It has more than 5,000 employees and 200,000 on-the-road delivery staff members.
The funding came after the company almost doubled its food delivery’s gross order value over the course of 2021 while its rapid grocery delivery offering, Instamart, is due to reach $1bn in gross merchandise volume run rate in the upcoming three quarters, it said.
Sriharsha Majety, co-founder and CEO of Swiggy, told TechCrunch: “Our goal is to make Swiggy the platform that 100 million consumers can use 15 times a month. We will continue to invest in our people, products and partners to create a positive impact on the ecosystem and accelerate the digital transformation in food and grocery delivery and other on-demand services.”
The company was valued at $5.5bn as of a $1.25bn series J round in July 2021 co-led by Prosus along with internet and telecommunications firm SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2. Its current valuation is higher than that of peer Zomato, which floated on the National Stock Exchange of India and the BSE in a dual listing in July 2021 at an implied valuation of up to $8.6bn.
Other India-based startups providing on-demand delivery services have raised funding recently, including 10-minute grocery distribution platform Zepto, which secured $100m in an October 2021 round not including corporate investors.
Blinkit, the instant grocery delivery service previously known as Grofers, which counts SoftBank Vision Fund as an investor, received $16.7m the same month to take its overall funding above $650m. E-commerce firm Amazon India also launched a food delivery service, Amazon Food, in India in mid-2020.
Image courtesy of Bundl Technologies Private Limited.
