About the company:
Swiggy in Kannada Suggi is also spelt as Swiggy. Suggi is the festival of harvesting and food.
Swiggy is Bengaluru based India’s largest food ordering and shipping startup. The company commenced operations back in 2014.
It works as a bridge between clients and restaurants. It uses an innovative technological platform that enables its customers to order food from local restaurants and have it delivered to their door.
Recent Achievements:
Lately indexed on the bourses at a valuation of $13 Billion and operating in more than 600 cities in India, Swiggy is now looking forward to acquiring delivery service startup Dunzo.
Swiggy is now trying to include non-meal services in their delivery catalogue so that it can compete well with the rival Zomato.
Apart from food delivery, Swiggy now also offers instant grocery delivery service by Instamart and has extended its pickup and delivery service to 65 cities.
About the founding fathers:
According to Sriharsha Majetti, the Co-founder and CEO of Swiggy, he started the company along with his two other buddies: Nandan Reddy and Rahul Jamini.
At that time, Sriharsha and Nandan Reddy just finished their Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, while Rahul completed his studies at IIT Kharagpur.
The Untold Story of ‘Bundl’:
Sriharsha Majetti, who was two years senior to Reddy, worked in a bank for almost a year after finishing his engineering, but he had had this strong ambition to start his own business, due to which he quit his bank employment.
Along with his friend Nandan Reddy, whom he met at the BITS Pilani campus, Sriharsha co-founded a logistic company, “Bundl”, jamming their ideas and opportunities in E-commerce. However, that did not last long, and they decided to close it in 2014.
According to Sriharsha, “It was the best call to shut down Bundl, after seeing the opportunity costs and smaller market opportunity.
Thereafter, we looked for bigger opportunities in logistics and came across some solutions in Urban logistics.
There were no such epiphanies about food delivery being broken, but the North star was about solving for Urban logistics.”
It was then Rahul Jamini, a senior software engineer at Myntra, met with Harsha and Nandan and decided to build what would become Swiggy today.
What motivated the founders?
While leading a bachelor life, both Nandan and Harsha had to order food from outside. They notice ample players are there for this game of delivering food, groceries, medicines but with plenty of shortcomings.
- The charge was quite a lot,
- No delivery unless minimum order of Rs. 500
- Poor quality packaging.
- Only hyperlocal deliveries.
- Restaurants being too busy would take a lot of time in delivery.
Thinking off the beaten track and delivering happiness at doorstep:
Swiggy began with 5-6 delivery partners and connecting 15-20 restaurants within Kormangala, Bangalore.
Until the December of 2014, the team was limited only to Harsha, Nanda, R Rahul and a few delivery agents, and the task is distributed between the three friends.
Nandan took care of the sales, customer service, firefighting and helping delivery guys, while Harsha used to do the deliveries himself, which was more than 100.
A dream doesn’t come true by magic; it takes sweat, determination and a great deal of hard work:
Swiggy had over 100 eateries ready to go by 2015 and was constantly delivering over 70,000 orders.
Swiggy raised $2 million in its first round of fundraising from Accel and SAIF Partners. It received money from two venture capital firms in addition to Norwest in 2015.
It takes patience and hard work to succeed, which the three of Sriharsha Majetty, Nandan Reddy and Rahul Jamini put into their business.
Swiggy became the country’s top food aggregator as a result of their hard work and patience.
