Co-founder Rahul Jaimini no longer active in Swiggy, joins new start-up

He moves to career accelerator start-up Pesto Tech as its co-founder; will remain on Swiggy board

Rahul Jaimini, the co-founder and CTO of food-tech giant Swiggy, is moving away from his active role this month to pursue another entrepreneurial venture. The company said Jaimini will be joining Pesto Tech, a career accelerator start-up as their co-founder. After having been an integral part of the founding team that built the company over the last six years, he will continue to be a shareholder and board member of Swiggy. The functions led by Jaimini will be realigned to Dale Vaz, Head of Engineering and Data Science at Swiggy. Vaz, who joined Swiggy in 2018 and was previously the head of engineering at Amazon India, is helping Swiggy become an “AI-first company”.

Jaimini co-founded Swiggy along with Sriharsha Majety and Nandan Reddy in 2014 and was instrumental in laying the tech foundation that powers the company today. He played a key role in building Swiggy’s technology backbone while overseeing its evolution into the complex system that harnesses terabytes of data and artificial intelligence and machine learning to deliver personalized experiences at scale. 

“The last six years at Swiggy were undoubtedly some of the best years. We set off with a massive goal to disrupt the food delivery industry and change the way the country eats, and this made for an exhilarating experience. Working with technology that has large scale impact is what excites me, and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to do just this at Swiggy and grow tremendously over the years,” said Rahul Jaimini. 

“Although the time has come to move on and pursue other interesting challenges, I will continue to cheer for Harsha (Majety), Nandan (Reddy) and the entire Swiggy team as it strives towards delivering unparalleled convenience for consumers across the country,” said Jaimini, an alumnus of IIT-Kharagpur.

Swiggy co-founder and CEO Sriharsha Majety said it was Jaimini’s passion to ‘build for the billions’ that drove technological innovations that set Swiggy apart as it grew phenomenally over the years. “Technology was crucial to what we set out to build when we started Swiggy. Nandan and I could not have asked for a better partner to handle this aspect of the company," Majety said.

Swiggy said its investors continue to put their trust in the company’s leadership and their ability to execute towards the larger goal and the recent round of funding of $156 million will further strengthen and expand services that offer unparalleled convenience to consumers.

Swiggy has raised a total of $1.6 billion in funding over 12 rounds from investors such as China’s Tencent Holdings, Meituan-Dianping and Prosus N.V. The other investors include Ark Impact, Korea Investment Partners and Samsung Ventures.

Recalling his association with Jaimini, Majety said that  7 years ago, he and Reddy were frantically looking for a tech co-founder and were using contractors to keep the lights on at Bundl, a  startup before Swiggy was founded. Jaimini, was working as a developer in the startup ecosystem. With the help of a friend, Majety connected with him on Facebook.

“I spent a good part of the next year pinging Rahul, seeking a call or a meeting. When he didn’t respond, I gave up completely on yet another unsuccessful expedition,” said Majety in a blog post. He later came to know that his friend had connected him to another person with the same name. It wasn’t all bad, though. “By then, we were already close to shutting down Bundl and were moving onto our new shiny idea around urban delivery. This time I got connected to the right Rahul Jaimini, and that changed things forever. Here began the craziest journey the three of us could have ever imagined,” said Majety. “The three of us hit it off like a house on fire.”

As the company scaled from 100 orders daily on a website-only offering to 15,000 orders daily in 6 months, Jaimini and a small missionary team ended up building an entire suite of apps for the customers, delivery partners and restaurant partners. It became the first brand in India to offer the delight of live tracking in delivery services.

Over the past six months, Jaimini had been taken by the future of remote working – especially the chance for India to disrupt the landscape with its access to world-class engineering talent. He’s also invested as an angel in a company that is eyeing this opportunity along with Majety and Reddy. “Diving deeper convinced him that this is another area he can have a huge impact on, building something from scratch,” said Majety.