Rapido raises $175 Mn led by Swiggy at valuation of $800 Mn

Update: Rapido has announced that it raised $180 million in this round.

Bike taxi platform Rapido has raised around $175 million in a new round from foodtech major Swiggy with participation from WestBridge, TVS Motor, Shell Ventures and Nexus Ventures. In August last year, WestBridge had led $52 million round in the Bengaluru-based startup.

Entrackr was first to report about Rapdio’s new round in December.

Rapido has issued 284,730 Series D CCPS and 10 Equity shares to raise Rs 1292.7 crore or around $175 million, regulatory filings show. Swiggy has alone put $124 million in this round followed by WestBrdige and TVS Motors which invested $29.8 million and $14.9 million respectively. The remaining sum came from Shell Ventures and Nexus ventures.

Swiggy and TVS Motor are new to the captable of the Aravind Sanka-led company.

As per Fintrackr’s estimates, Rapido has scooped the new round at a post-money valuation of over $800 million. This is a significant jump in the company’s valuation which was $235 million during the previous round. The company may receive more funds in this round which has raised over $300 million since its inception.

Seven-year-old Rapido had also held talks with Zomato and Ola for its new round. However, the talks did not materialise as per previous reports by Entrackr. Currently present in around 100 cities, Rapido claims to have over 15 million customers and more than 1.5 million driver partners.

As per Entrackr’s sources, it does around 10 million rides every month and 80% of the volume comes from the bike taxi segment while the remaining comes from auto services and logistics and on-demand delivery.

Rapido directly competes with Ola in the bike taxi and auto segment.

Despite the pandemic, Rapido’s scale grew over 77% during FY21 to Rs 75.6 crore from Rs 42.61 crore in FY20. According to its regulatory filings, the company’s total expenses were reduced by 15.5% to Rs 254.36 crore in FY21 and it managed to control its losses by around 32% in the fiscal year ending March 2021.