Rahul Jaimini, CTO and Co-founder, Swiggy, bids adieu to the foodtech unicorn

Sriharsha Majety, Co-founder and CEO, Swiggy, the Bengaluru-based foodtech unicorn, put out a heartfelt goodbye blogpost and email bidding their Co-founder and CTO, Rahul Jaimini goodbye. Several sources believe Rahul will be joining the income sharing edtech platform — Pesto. Interestingly, Swiggy is an investor in the platform.

In a press statement shared by the company, Rahul said:

“The last six years at Swiggy were undoubtedly some of the best years. We set off with a massive goal to disrupt the food delivery industry and change the way the country eats, and this made for an exhilarating experience. Working with technology that has large scale impact is what excites me, and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to do just this at Swiggy and grow tremendously over the years. Although the time has come to move on and pursue other interesting challenges, I will continue to cheer for Harsha, Nandan and the entire Swiggy team as it strives towards delivering unparalleled convenience for consumers across the country."

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Swiggy sets up a new engineering team in Chennai to drive technological innovations

Rahul Jaimini co-founded Swiggy along with Sriharsha Majety and Nandan Reddy in 2014 and was instrumental in laying the tech foundation that powers the company today. He played a key role in building Swiggy’s technology backbone while overseeing its evolution into the complex system that harnesses terabytes of data and AI/ML to deliver personalised experiences at scale. 

Functions currently led by Rahul, including platform engineering, analytics, IT and Labs, will be realigned to Dale Vaz, Head of Engineering and Data Science, who has been with the company for close to two years.

In the blog post, Harsha said:

"Over the last six months, Rahul had been taken by the future of remote working – especially the chance for India to disrupt the landscape with its access to world-class engineering talent. He’s also invested as an angel in a company that is eyeing this opportunity (Nandan and I joined the round), and diving deeper convinced him that this is another area he can have a huge impact on, building something from scratch."

The blog post also explained in detail how Rahul joined the founding team. Harsha says, back then, Nandan Reddy, Co-founder, and Harsha were looking for a tech co-founder and were introduced to Rahul through a mutual friend.

"The three of us hit it off like a house on fire. We developed this implicit sense of trust very quickly, despite not having known each other for more than a month. Since then, the three of us have had our highs and absolute lows, but our dogged belief in the mission and in each other has kept us going through crazy tough phases. As we scaled from 100 orders daily on a website-only offering to 15,000 orders daily in six months, Rahul and a small missionary team ended up building an entire suite of apps for our customers, delivery partners and restaurant partners. We were also the first brand in India to offer the delight of live tracking in delivery services," said Harsha.

The press statement shared by the company added that Swiggy’s investors continue to put their trust in the company’s leadership and their ability to execute towards the larger goal. The note added that the recent round of funding of $156 million will further strengthen and expand services that offer unparalleled convenience to consumers.