India’s online food delivery service, Swiggy raised $1 billion in a funding round led by South Africa’s Naspers. This is coming just after Naspers led a $540 million investment in EdTech start-up, BYJU’S – the creator of the most popular K-12 learning app in India.
Tencent Holdings Ltd, Hillhouse Capital and Wellington Management Company also took part in this round. Existing financiers who also return as participants in this round include DST Global, Meituan Dianping and Coatue Management. Naspers is known for funding Tencent, Udemy, Codecademy and Brainly.
Swiggy, which was founded in 2014 is based in the southern Indian tech hub of Bengaluru and is valued at a little over $3 billion after this funding round, according to Reuters.
This is a major investment deal in a food delivery company outside China, and portend Swiggy as one of the billion-dollar-companies.
See Also: Naspers Leads $540 million Investment Fund in Indian Edtech Start-up
Swiggy runs a mobile-based application and a website for food-delivery services. It currently works with 50,000 restaurants in over 50 Indian cities. The company will use the capital for hiring machine learning and engineering talent and also, further its AI technology to improve matching and discovery inside its service, the company had said.
It competes with a fellow foodtech startup, Unicorn Zomato, which is valued at over $1 billion, Ola-owned FoodPanda and Uber Eats, which came to India around 18 months ago.
The deal brings Swiggy’s total fund to $1.26 billion raised to date, including the latest round which was $210 million at a $1.3 billion valuation.
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