Indian Food Delivery Startup Swiggy Achieves Unicorn Status

Indian food delivery startup Swiggy has reached the coveted unicorn status, bringing its competitors harder work. In an investment round led by Naspers and DST Global, Swiggy raked in USD 210 million in funds, bringing its valuation to around USD 1.3 billion, allowing it to enter the billion-dollar club.

It has taken Swiggy, which was founded in August 2014, 3 years and 10 months to get here. Before Swiggy, two other companies attained unicorn status this year, Paytm Mall and BYJU.

While DST Global is a new entry among Swiggy’s backers, Naspers has been Swiggy’s investor in the funding round of February, along with Chinese company Meituan Dianping. Naspers is known for their successful bet on Chinese company Tencent. Apart from these, Coatue Management has also taken part in this funding round.

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“With this investment, we will continue to widen Swiggy’s offerings, along with bolstering our capabilities and plugging the gaps in the on-demand delivery ecosystem,” Techcrunch quoted Swiggy CEO Sriharsha Majety from a statement.

Swiggy faces competition from restaurant search and discovery service Zomato and Food Panda India, which was acquired by Ola, and Uber Eats, Uber’s food service wing in India. Google has also joined the food delivery race by launching Areo in April 2017.

Currently, Swiggy has 35,000 restaurants under its wing and boasts of a delivery fleet of around 40,000. According to reports, the company has had a three-fold spike in revenues in the last financial year. Reports are also saying that Swiggy’s plan for the capital raised includes expansion to new locations within the country while building a better logistics network to reach out to more customers in a better way.

Other startups that are projected to join Swiggy in the unicorn club are Practo, Delhivery, Rivigo, Freshworks, Blackbuck, Oyo and Bigbasket.

While US and China have been spewing startups achieving Unicorn status, India seems to be catching up, albeit slowly. India’s current tech Unicorns include Flipkart, Paytm, Ola, InMobi, Byju, Infibeam, Info Edge, Justdail, Makemytrip, Zomato, MuSigma, Quikr, Shopclues, Hike and Snapdeal.

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2018 has seen online retail success Byju digital payments platform Paytm get there. In contrast, China has a string of companies such as Ant Financial, CATL, Cainiao Logistics, Jiedaibao, WeBank, PingAn Health Insurance Tech, and KingSoft Cloud. In addition, American startups like SpaceX, Moderna Therapeutics, Hulu, Robinhood, Oscar Health, Snowflake Computing, DoorDash, and many more have joined the Unicorn club this year.

Surprisingly, Indonesia is also making progress in the race for Unicorn status with four of their startups joining the club, namely, Bukalapak, Tokopedia, Traveloka, and GO-JEK. In fact, along with Singapore and South Korea, Asian countries seem ahead in this year’s line-up.