Two weeks ago, Swiggy had announced $100 million Series F round from Naspers and world’s fourth-most valuable startup and Chinese O2O major Meituan-Dianping. While the round was disclosed, it wasn’t clear who invested how much.
Now, the RoC filings show that Naspers has injected $59.6 million (Rs 385 crore) while remaining $39.6 million (Rs 256 crore) came from Meituan-Dianping. Notably, Swiggy raised the three digits round just after Alibaba’s $200 million investment into Zomato.
With the Series F round, Swiggy has raked in $225 million in total risk capital from the aforementioned investors, including Accel India, SAIF Partners Bessemer and three others.
On the lines of the battle for supremacy amongst Amazon and Alibaba (with SoftBank) in the e-commerce space, similar sort of antagonism is prevailing between arch-rivals Alibaba and Tencent for winning online food ordering segment in India.
Alibaba and Tencent have invested over multi-billion dollars in O2O platforms (mainly delivering food)- Ele.me and Meituan-Dianping, respectively in China. While Alibaba pumped in $1 billion in Ele.me in May last year, in November 2017 Tencent along with Priceline had invested massive $4 billion in Meituan-Dianping.
Both Chinese juggernauts are eying for deeper impact as well as penetration in India. Since, they have placed their bets across verticals such as ride-hailing, e-commerce, digital payment, social network, healthcare, and grocery, now they want to dominate overall on-demand O2O space in India.
Presently, instant food delivery, grocery, and home services are largest verticals in offline to online (O2O) space in India. Alibaba wants to develop various use cases for its Indian vehicle Paytm as it did in China (through Alipay) while driven by FOMO (fear of missing out) Tencent is looking to double down its investments in India.
Since both have been fighting closely in their home market in food delivery segment through Meituan-Dianping and Ele.me, placing bets against each other in India is obvious.
It would be interesting to see whether Swiggy follows Meituan-Dianping footsteps or not. Besides online food ordering, Meituan-Dianping also sells grocery, air ticket bookings, hyperlocal deals among others.
The Swiggy’s Series F round split was first reported by paper.vc.
