 "Sriharsha Majety CEO & Co-founder Swiggy")
In 2015, when Vivek Sunder left India to head Procter & Gamble’s Ethiopia operations, he had not heard about a start-up called Swiggy, which is not surprising. Sunder was P&G’s director of commercial operations in Mumbai, while the then one-year-old online food delivery platform was predominantly confined to Bengaluru, the city where it is based.
So early last year, when he got an opportunity to return to India, and that too as the chief operating officer (COO) of Swiggy, it was not an easy decision for him. Sunder thought it over for almost three months, had several discussions with the company’s investors, visited Bengaluru to meet the three co-founders and senior management of Bundl Technologies, the company that owns the Swiggy brand. Finally, convinced that he could contribute in building an enterprise of the future, the IIM-Calcutta alumnus signed up.
Sunder’s joining Swiggy is significant. First, the promoters-led company is open to hiring senior executives from outside — besides Sunder, it also hired Amazon India’s head of software engineering as its head of engineering and data sciences, and former Britannia and Olam International executive Rahul Bothra as CFO.
This indicates that the company is eyeing the next level of growth, given the huge opportunities in online delivery and the customer trust it enjoys.
“The most important learning I had is the power of getting really strong leaders and giving them all the autonomy they require to succeed,” says Sriharsha Majety, Swiggy’s co-founder & CEO, a BITS-Pilani and IIM-Calcutta alumnus who also had a stint with Nomura in London before starting Bundl Technologies.
“As the company grows in scale and complexity, you need people who have handled some of these complexities in the past, can attract great leaders themselves, and are able to take the company to the next level,” he adds.
The scorching pace of growth that the company is witnessing can be gauged from the fact that in just the last couple of months Swiggy has nearly doubled its presence to 100 cities. “When I joined in July last year, we were launching our service in one new city almost every two months, and now we are launching a new city every two days,” says Sunder.
And when growth and customer experience are the only focus, the company will obviously require funding support. This was evident when Swiggy raised $1 billion last December (including $200 million in secondary sales by some investors who exited either partly or fully), led by South African internet and media conglomerate Naspers, which catapulted its valuation by more than two and half times in just six months, to $3.3 billion.
Valuation however is something that has never been a distraction for Majety. The most important thing, he says, is to solve customers’ problems; everything else, including growth and valuation revolve, around that. “When we started the company, I didn’t even anticipate how large we will become. For example, when we achieved 5,000 orders a day, it was a huge achievement.”
Swiggy has since grown by leaps and bounds. It now has some 125,000 delivery partners who, from its network of 60,000 partner restaurants, deliver food in over 100 cities across the country. While the company has stopped giving order booking numbers, the last publicly available numbers indicate it was booking 28 million orders a month in December 2018. This means, at any given minute during the day, there are at least 700-800 Swiggy delivery boys on the road delivering food to customers, which speaks volumes about the scale on which it operates.
After food, Swiggy has set its sights on several related offerings, such as grocery delivery and offering food at campuses of large academic institutes. It has already launched Swiggy Stores, the local commerce platform in Gurugram, though on a pilot basis, and may soon take it to other cities. Cloud Kitchen is an initiative that offers food from company-managed centralised premises in cities. Partner restaurants run these cloud kitchens, to conveniently reach out to larger audiences.
“Before launching any new business, we think about a couple of things — is there a large market opportunity; is there a real customer problem and how suited are we with our capabilities to solve those? So, we will find out only by constantly experimenting and by keeping our eyes and ears open to consumer needs and then working backwards,” says Majety.
