UberEats, Foodpanda, TinyOwl, Roadrunnr, Ola Foods. Since 2014, Swiggy has seen off many deep-pocketed competitors in the food delivery space despite not being the first mover or, for the longest time, the most capitalised.

“It just out-executed these companies,” said an early investor of Swiggy. 

But the firm, founded by Sriharsha Majety, Nandan Reddy and Rahul Jaimini, met its match in 2017, when Zomato scaled up its food delivery using its integrated logistics stack with Runnr. At the time, Swiggy was clocking up 5 million orders a month and Zomato 3 million, according to media reports.

“That’s when conversations in Swiggy started shifting to topics like setting up processes and systems and managing scale. It was a typical transition from a startup to a large business,” the investor said.