India’s most funded e-commerce company Flipkart and Chinese firm Tencent may together invest $100 million in food delivery startup Swiggy. According to a report in The-Ken, these companies are in conversations for a month and will soon seal the deal.
Till date, Bengaluru-based Swiggy has raised $156 million. In May this year, Swiggy had raised $80 million in Series E funding led by Naspers. The startup raised the funds at a valuation of $400 million. Whereas its competitor Zomato has raised about $223 million till date and last raised funding in 2015 at a valuation of about $960 million. It is also reportedly in talks with Chinese investor Ant Financial for a $200 million funding round.
Recently, Swiggy has opened up new avenues for making revenue: cloud kitchens and advertisement.
At present, Swiggy does about 4 million orders a month while Zomato processes about 3 million orders on a monthly basis. Zomato has also turned profitable in all geographies. It recently announced a zero commission campaign for restaurant partners. In India, around 10 million people order food online.
The foodtech space in India is currently on a rise. As per a report by RedSeer, India’s online food delivery market comprising of aggregators and cloud kitchens grew at 150% last year.
Flipkart, off late, has been on investment spree. E-tailer is also in talks with services firm UrbanClap and furniture retailer UrbanLadder.
According to sources, the e-tailer is seeking large, strategic deals that will directly help its business. As per the filing with the corporate affair ministry in September, Flipkart increased its reserves for financing acquisitions and significant investments to roughly Rs 8,000 crore (over $1.2 billion) from earlier levels of Rs 3,000 crore.
Indian e-commerce space has now been witnessing the formation of camps in terms of the backing of investors- Amazon India, backed by deep-pocketed parent company Amazon, Flipkart has backers in SoftBank and Tencent and Paytm got Alibaba and SoftBank as investors.
Entrackr sent both Flipkart and Swiggy, a detailed questionnaire which has not elicit any response from them.
