[Funding alert] Swiggy raises $800M at $5B valuation

Bengaluru-based hyperlocal delivery platform Swiggy has raised $800 million in funding. According to the Registrar of Companies (RoC) filing by the company, the round was led by Falcon Edge, Amansa Capital, Think Investments, Carmignac, and Goldman Sachs.

While Swiggy refused to officially comment on the funding, a source confirmed the company's valuation to be $5 billion post the funding. The round also saw participation from Singapore's GIC and Qatar Investment Authority. Existing investors - Accel Partners and Prosus Ventures participated in this round of funding.

Swiggy was founded in 2014 by Sriharhsa Majety, Nandan Reddy, and Rahul Jaimini. It achieved the unicorn status in December 2017, and has over 1,30,000 delivery partners (the foodtech startup had 2,20,000 delivery partners before the pandemic). Rahul no longer plays an operational role at Swiggy.

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Swiggy was operational in 50 cities by the end of 2018, expanded to 100 cities by March 2019, and then to 500 cities by December 2019. In March 2015, Swiggy was clocking one million orders per month; this touched four million per month by July 2017, 14 million a month in May 2018, 21 million per month in September 2018, and a whopping 30 million orders per month in January 2019. 

Genie, its new Dunzo-like feature that services any kind of delivery anywhere, is now present in 65 cities. Instamart, the grocery delivery platform, is operational in two cities; and HealthHub, which focuses on health foods, is available in four cities. 

On average, Swiggy, which competes with Zomato and Dunzo, completes about 1.45 million orders in a day. This fundraise comes close to the heels of Zomato's funding of $660 million in December 2020. Zomato is on the path to an IPO and is also looking to raise an additional $140 million.

The pandemic and subsequent lockdowns led to a drop in food delivery orders in March 2020, but the additional businesses of Genie and Grocery (now Instamart) had brought in 100 million orders till October 2020.

The lockdown led many restaurants to permanently shut down due to the sudden drop in dine-ins. However, as the country began slowly unlocking, Swiggy started witnessing a surge in new restaurants. It is currently onboarding 7,000+ restaurants every month, with the current count exceeding one lakh.

With this fund raise, the battle between the two unicorns — Swiggy and Zomato — simply becomes fiercer.