Loading...
Why step out when you can get it all delivered.
In 2013, Sriharsha Majety and Nandan Reddy were trying to build a logistics business. Their startup, Bundl, aimed to help e-commerce sellers manage shipments by aggregating different courier services.
The idea did not work as planned.
Instead of treating the failure as the end of their entrepreneurial journey, the founders carried something valuable forward: an understanding of India's complicated last-mile logistics problem.
That experience would soon lead them somewhere completely different — food.
By 2014, online food ordering already existed in India, but the experience was far from seamless. Restaurants were being connected with customers online, while delivery was often left to the restaurants themselves.
Majety and Reddy saw an opportunity to solve the problem from the other end.
They brought in Rahul Jaimini, a software engineer who had previously worked at Myntra, and the three founders began building a new kind of food-delivery company.
In 2014, Swiggy was born in Bengaluru.
The company's early proposition was simple: don't just connect customers with restaurants — control the delivery experience yourself.
That decision became the foundation of the company.
Swiggy invested heavily in its own delivery network instead of depending entirely on restaurants to handle the last mile.
This created a full-stack model in which Swiggy could control the customer journey from placing an order to receiving it.
As Sriharsha Majety later described it:
“Swiggy pioneered a full-stack food tech offering with integrated consumer experience through complete visibility from ordering to delivery.”
The company built technology for customers, restaurants and delivery partners while simultaneously developing a dense local delivery network. Swiggy itself says the business grew from roughly 100 orders a day to 15,000 orders a day within six months during its early period.
The strategy was expensive, but it created an important advantage: Swiggy could control the most difficult part of the transaction — the last mile.
That infrastructure eventually became much more valuable than food delivery alone.
For several years, food delivery remained Swiggy's core business. But the company gradually realised that its biggest asset was not simply its restaurant marketplace.
It was the combination of millions of consumers + technology + local delivery infrastructure.
So Swiggy began expanding beyond restaurant meals.
In 2020, Swiggy entered quick commerce with Swiggy Instamart, allowing customers to order groceries and everyday essentials for rapid delivery.
This was a major strategic shift.
Swiggy was no longer competing only for someone's dinner order. It was entering the much larger market for everyday convenience.
The scale of that transformation is visible in the numbers. In FY2025, Instamart had 1,021 active dark stores, while its GOV had reached approximately ₹14,700 crore. Its GOV had grown at a 107% CAGR between FY2022 and FY2025.
Swiggy also expanded into dining through its acquisition of Dineout in 2022, bringing restaurant reservations and dining-out experiences into the same ecosystem.
After a decade of expansion, Swiggy reached another defining moment.
In November 2024, it went public.
Its IPO amounted to approximately ₹11,327 crore, consisting of a fresh issue of around ₹4,499 crore and an offer for sale of approximately ₹6,828 crore.
Swiggy's public-market debut changed the nature of the company. The startup now had to balance growth with the expectations of public-market investors.
And that made profitability increasingly important.
Swiggy's transformation has continued beyond its IPO.
By FY2025, the company had 17.7 million average monthly transacting users, 238,000 average monthly transacting restaurant partners, 515,000 average monthly transacting delivery partners and operations across 718 cities.
By FY2026, its food-delivery business had reached ₹1,000 crore in annual adjusted EBITDA, while Instamart's GOV reached ₹7,881 crore in the March 2026 quarter, growing 68.8% year over year.
The company is now pushing further into quick commerce, affordability-led food delivery and new consumer services.
In Q1 FY2027, Swiggy reported food-delivery GOV of ₹9,490 crore, while Instamart reached ₹7,907 crore of GOV and more than 1,200 dark stores.
Swiggy's journey is ultimately not just a story about delivering food.
It began with a failed logistics startup, discovered that India's food-delivery experience had a last-mile problem, built its own delivery infrastructure, and then used that infrastructure to enter groceries, dining and broader on-demand commerce.
The company started by delivering meals. Its larger ambition is to deliver convenience.
That evolution—from Bundl to Swiggy, from food delivery to an on-demand convenience platform—is what defines the startup story.
Official website: Swiggy
Investor reports: Swiggy Investor Relations
