Online food ordering and delivery major Swiggy has raised $80 million (Rs 517 crores approximately) in Series E funding led by Naspers. The round also witnessed participation of existing investors – Accel India, SAIF Partners India, Bessemer Venture Partners, Harmony Partners and Norwest Venture Partners.
Following the deal, Ashutosh Sharma, head of investments in India for Naspers will join the Swiggy Board.
According to Economic Times report, the Bengaluru based company will deploy funds towards hiring engineering talent and develop deeper technology for better prediction of demand, consumer preferences and improving delivery efficiencies.
With this round, Swiggy will also expand its geographical reach from current eight locations. Sriharsha Majety, CEO of Swiggy said,
We have a fully scaled technology platform but will look at growing our data science and machine learning capabilities. Our current team size in data sciences in single digits but we plan to grow that. We will also double our engineering team by 2018 to 200 people and will be hiring for middle and senior leadership teams.
Prior to this round, Swiggy had raised about $50 million collectively in Series C and D rounds last year. While $35 million Series C round came in January 2016, $15million Series D round had come up in September last year.
The proceeds will also be allocated to increase the service offerings of Swiggy to restaurant partners as opposed to plain vanilla order placement and fulfilment operations.
Of late, the company has been grappling with bringing down cost of delivery as it posted 65 fold increase in losses for FY 2015-16 at Rs 137.18 crore from Rs 2.12 crore in FY 2014-15. To curb losses, Swiggy had introduced delivery charges along with surge pricing feature last year.
“We have seen 35% reduction in delivery costs and recorded 6x growth in revenues last year. We will look at a strong growth year ahead,” added Majety. The platform had recorded 1 million orders in April 2016 though the company declined to share the current metrics.
With this Series E funding of $80 million, Swiggy had raised about $155.5 million in total funding. Currently, Swiggy competes with Zomato, Foodpanda and recently launched UberEATS.
