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swiggy

Swiggy – A Bangalore-based Food Ordering And Delivery Platform.

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Swiggy is a leading Indian food ordering and delivery platform which also provides services like on-demand grocery delivery known as Instamart and a same-day package delivery called Swiggy Genie. It was founded eight years ago in July 2014 by Sriharsha Majety, Nandan Reddy, and Rahul Jaimini, headquartered in Banglore, India, with its business expanded across 500+ Indian cities (2021). Naspers owns it. SuprDaily and Dineout are its two subsidiaries. Besides the founders, Dale Vaz, who is the Chief Technical Officer of Swiggy, contributed a lot to it and is one of the key people. It achieved a revenue of 2,776 Crore INR in 2020.

History

In 2013, Sriharsha Majety and Nandan Reddy devised an e-commerce website to provide shipping and courier services called Bundl in India. It was discontinued due to various reasons. They decided to rebrand it to enter the food delivery industry. The food delivery industry was in chaos at that time because of the rising competition. The different startups like Foodpanda, acquired by Ola Labs, Ola Cafe (later discontinued), and TinyOwl, purchased by Zomato, were struggling. Swiggy founders joined hands with a former senior software engineer at Myntra, Rahul Jaimini, and established Swiggy and Its parent company Bundl Technologies in 2013.

In 2019, Swiggy started Swiggy Stores, a general product delivery service, sourcing items from local stores. The firm launched an instant grocery service known as Instamart with the help of dark stores in August 2020. Swiggy Stores were closed in early 2021, and the firm decided to expand its services using Instamart. In September 2019, Swiggy came up with a new service, a pickup and delivery service known as Swiggy Go which provided services such as delivering documents, laundry, parcels, etc., from business owners to retailers, and was rebranded as Swiggy Genie.

Unfortunately, In May 2020, Due to the covid-19 pandemic, it fired over 1000s of employees, and later in 2021, it decided to cover vaccination costs for its delivery partners.

swiggy
Image source: amazonaws.com

Revenue

The company experienced growth in revenue from 2015 (0.11 crores INR) to 2020 (2,693 crores INR), which got reduced in 2021 (2,145).

Acquisitions And Investments

In 2015, Accel and SAIF partners invested 2 million U.S dollars in Swiggy. It also received additional investment from Norwest Venture Partners. In 2016, it obtained an investment of about 15 million U.S dollars from its investors, including some new investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners and Harmony Partners. Naspers entrusted funding of 80 million to Swiggy in 2017. Due to this growth of investments and investors, Swiggy’s value increased to 3.6 million USD in April 2020.

It acquired 48East, a Banglore-based Asian Food start-up in 2017 and Mumbai-based Scootsy Logistics, a fashion and food delivery service which was later shut down. Also, in September 2018, it purchased a Mumbai-based milk delivery start-up SuprDaily and invested about 31 crores INR in a ready-to-eat Mumbai-based food brand, fingerLix, in 2019.

Partnerships

It has partnered with several renowned brands such as Burger King, Google Local Guide, Sodexo, ICICI Bank and ANRA Technologies.

Founders – Nandan Reddy, Sriharsha Majety, Rahul Jaimini

Rahul Jaimini is the Co-founder of Swiggy and Pesto Tech, born in Banglore. He also worked as a senior software engineer at Myntra, a member of technical staff at NetApp, and a research lab intern at Philips Research. Rahul holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s dual degree in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.

Co-founder Nandan Reddy is also a BITS Pilani alumnus and worked as a consultant. He also built a start-up around tablet-based POS for different restaurants and Café and has been in the core management team of India’s first rural BPO, Source Pilani. Bundl, a logistic platform, was also built by him.

CEO – Sriharsha Majety

Chief Executive Officer Sriharsha Majety is also the co-founder of Swiggy and Bundl. He also worked as an associate member in Nomura International, Recruitment coordinator in IIM Calcutta, and holds a degree in finance from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.

caviar

Jason Wang : The ‘$10 to $90M’ Journey of a Passionate Entrepreneur

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Entrepreneurship has always been a term that possibly the three-fourth of the world population look forward to. There are rarely any people who are happy with the idea of the 9 to 5 job. Every person must have thought about starting up their own business and being their own boss at least once in their lifetime. And it is fair too, as working for oneself and doing the work out of passion is what makes everyone successful. One such person, who was always in the favour of becoming his own boss is Jason Wang, an American serial-entrepreneur, who founded the food delivery service Caviar.

Jason Wang belongs to the Japanese descendent and graduated from Berkely University. He was still in school when he started his first business, i.e., an anime website, which served a total of 30,000 unique visitors every month. He received $1 for every ten visitors through ads, and hence, was earning $30 a day. But soon, the creators of Cardcaptor seized the domain name of his website, and his first business came to an end.

After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, (Haas School of Business), he worked with big-name companies, including Google and Microsoft. Though he had a good salary package and had a stable job, he was still dreaming of building his business. So finally, after leaving his corporate job, he founded a mobile app development company, 815 Productions, in 2010. With his company, he developed an app that extracted data from Craigslist. Though the app was quite useful, the venture also got shut in a few months. But still, he remained to be encouraged to do something big and on his own. He kept on thinking of new ideas that would be a kick-starter for his entrepreneurship.

Jason Wang Caviar
Image Source: bizjournals.com

During the same time, Groupon was taking over the world with its amazing deals. He was impressed by how the company was establishing itself in no time. Seeing the growth of the company, Jason was forced to look at the business model of Groupon, upon which he found out that most of the people were going for the food deals on the platform. This led him to think of a similar coupon business that only would provide deals in food items.

Jason concluded that it would be better to target the university students to get more customers in one place without investing in ads. So he launched MunchOnMe for the Berkeley University students first. At the same time, Paul Graham from Y Combinator came to the university for his keynote and asked the students to apply for the accelerator program at Y Combinator.

Jason Wang had already registered 3000 users to MunchOnMe and applied to Y Combinator with the same idea. He made it to Y Combinator for its summer batch. It was a life-changing experience for him, as he got to listen to the big tech entrepreneurs and learn more about the business. He also received an $18000 seed funding for MunchOnMe.

After launching MunchOnMe officially for the general public, Jason realised that the business was good, but could not sustain for a longer time. So after operating it for a few months, he decided to sell the company. While selling the company, he made it clear to the buyers that he won’t be a part of the company and will lose every right over it.

The money he earned from the company’s acquisition helped him and his teammates to survive for a year and a half. But after that, he ran out of money. According to an interview with Jason Wang, there was a time when he had only $10 in his business account. But fortunately, the place he was renting had enough space to make room for new tenants, and he rented half of the place for $600.

While working in his office in San Francisco, he and his teammates felt the craving for Ike Place’s sandwiches, but the restaurant was on a distance of 45 minutes. So it would take them to go and come back from the restaurant a total of one and a half hours plus one hour of standing in the long queue at the restaurant. They called the restaurant for delivery, but they did not have the service available at that time. This was the year 2012, even before Uber. So there were no resources that could help Jason and his teammates to get the sandwich in time.

This incident made Jason think of a delivery service that would help people to get the desired food at their doorsteps. This led to the launch of Caviar.

Jason started working on the idea and partnered with three restaurants, i.e., Ikes Place, HRD and Nick’s Cripsy Tacos. The idea was to get people what they wanted to eat, delivered at their doorsteps. And, initially, Jason and his team would deliver the food by themselves. It was easier for him to get new customers as he talked about the idea with his friends from the University, Office, and also from Y Combinator. In the beginning, they would deliver on the lunchtimes and only on the weekdays. But soon, the company started gaining more customers and partnered with more restaurants. This way, Caviar gained most of its users within the six months of its launch and became popular among the masses.

The company had a kickstart, and in two years, it raised more than a $13 million from the investors. Jason did not have a long journey with Caviar, but it was the most successful business of his life. He sold the company to Square in 2014 for a rumoured $90 million.

Though Jason Wang sold his company, he is still active as a growing entrepreneur and has made a few investments in different ventures. Alongside Caviar, he also launched a few restaurants and also co-owns a hospitality group called Umai. He is also the founding partner of Beluga Capital, the venture that helps the tech startups with funding. He is a big food lover and also founded a food blog named Cityfoodsters. Jason also got his name listed under the Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2015.

faasos

Faasos : The Biggest Cloud Kitchen Restaurant Company in India

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Most of the times, the low phases of a person’s life help him/her discover the right path for their future. But what if you are already on the right path, but this very path does not interest you anymore? Same happened with two friends, Jaydeep Barman and Kallol Banerjee, from Kolkata, India, who though were working with one of the finest companies, but still, something they always felt was missing. So what one should do in such a situation? Discover the right thing to do, and that is what they did, they founded Faasos.

Faasos is an online restaurant service, biggest in the world, that provides its customers with on-demand food delivery services. Seems similar? But it is not, the business model of Faasos is way different from Grubhub, Uber Eats and Zomato.

The Founders

Jaydeep Barman and Kallol Banerjee, both belong to Kolkata and have been friends for over two decades. The two, after completing an MBA course, started working for different firms. Meanwhile, one evening sitting at their Pune apartment, the two decided to launch a restaurant as a part-time business. But the uniqueness of the restaurant has to be Indian cuisine and no foreign brand food. So in 2004, the two started Faasos, a restaurant with the touch of Kolkata’s taste in Pune.

Faasos Founders
Image Source: inc42.com

The restaurant was running side by side, and the two started another management course at INSEAD. After they completed the course, Barman joined the consulting team at Mckinsey London, and Banerjee moved to Singapore to work for Bosch.

Alongside their job, they anyhow managed to open five more Faasos restaurants in Pune. While working with the two leading MNCs, they had to live separate from their family. Wives of both friends worked in different countries. It was quite hectic for the two to manage their job and family, all together. So one fine day, they decided to leave their jobs and come back to India to expand their restaurant business.

Making Passion the Career

After realising their passion after seven years, they had to come up with an idea that would help support their decision financially. So they thought of an on-demand food delivery model for their business. So they took the responsibility of all the three processes that are the part of an online-food-delivery service, i.e. taking the orders, food preparation and delivering quality food.

The idea was different, and they pitched it in front of Sequoia capital and raised $5 million in November 2011. The main idea that attracted the Sequoias was keeping the fixed prices low.

The Challenge

Soon, the chain had 16 restaurants in Pune and Mumbai. The customers could order from the telephone as well as the Faasos website. But it became quite challenging for them to run their business in Mumbai, as the rents were high in Mumbai, and they did not have any references for suppliers there. The biggest mistake they did was to hire veterans to run their restaurant and the warehouse.

The two concluded that they should hire freshers, who want to succeed in life. So they introduced the FER (Faasos Entrepreneurs-in-Residence) programme. The unique thing they did was posted the job in a blogpost and had asked the aspirants not to send CVs, as everyone glorifies themselves in a CV.

The post went viral, and they received over 1,000 applications. After fifty telephonic and ten personal interviews, they had hired a good team of eight. The team took all the responsibility from running operations to managing the supply chain, etc.

Rise of the Company

The company launched its mobile app in March 2014. The app launch increased the number of orders, and 80 per cent of the orders were coming from the app only. The app was easy to use, and thus, the owners decided to turn their service into app-only service. The app processes over 30,000 orders every month.

In February, the company raised another $20 million in the second round of funding, and in the next funding round, the company raise $30 million, in December 2015.

Faasos as of 2017, was operating in 150 locations in 20 major cities of India, including Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Surat, Kolkata, Chennai, Coimbatore, Hyderabad, Nagpur, Gurgaon, Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Indore, etc.

In July 2019, the company received $125 million investment from Go-Jek, Coatue Management, and Goldman Sachs, and now, operates 235 kitchens across 20 Indian cities.

Ordermark

Ordermark : A Service that Streamlines the Online Orders for the Restaurants

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It has become so easy for us to get things delivered to our doorsteps with just a few clicks, especially food. Numerous food apps provide 30 minutes delivery service, and for us, it is quite easy to use those apps. But for the restaurants, despite the high revenues generated through these apps, it is quite a complex process to keep track of every single app and serve the customers efficiently. Since people are making more online orders, to keep up, the restaurants need to register in all the apps. But some times, it becomes very confusing for them to operate so many apps and carry out the other processes. To deal with this problem, Alan Canter came with Ordermark, a single platform that can connect different apps at one place and streamline the whole food delivery process.

Alex Canter: Early Life and Career

Alex Canter is a native of Los Angeles and a graduate in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also the 4th generation owner of the famous nine decades-old restaurant, Canter’s Deli, based in Los Angeles.

As soon as Canter grew thirteen, he started waiting tables at his family restaurant. And after he graduated, he started working full-time at the restaurant. At the restaurant, he handled the post of operation manager and started experimenting on new ideas to grow their business and improve the services. He came up with the point of sale system and also revamped the restaurant website. With time, the online order services also started expanding, and he also registered his restaurant with multiple online food delivery platforms, like Eat24, DoorDash and Grubhub.

Alex Canter Ordermark
Image Source: prweb.com

Initially, he experimented with the various food items that their restaurant could serve fresh, sandwiches being the first item on the menu. In fact, he himself went to deliver over 20 orders a day, through some other delivery services. As time passed by, a larger menu was already built for the deliveries. The online deliveries were getting them 30 per cent more revenue, but soon it becomes quite hectic to handle the online as well as offline customers.

Most of the times, the staff was confused, and the various devices that were logged in to different delivery apps caused chaos among them. There were multiple smartphones, laptops, and tablets, all specially used for operating the various food delivery apps. This way, sometimes the online customer was getting late deliveries or wrong food items, or the live customers were turning back without having their food.

These reasons were enough for Canter to think of a better option, as he could not shut down his four generations old live business nor he could bear the loss that shutting down the online deliveries could cause. He even went to meet the other restaurant owners and discussed the matter with them. It did not surprise him to hear that these restaurant owners were also finding it difficult to manage all the orders online as well as offline.

Founding Ordermark

Canter hired a professional team, and after analysing the problem, got to the conclusion that the restaurants wanted a system that could streamline all the orders at one place and print a similar-looking order summary through a single platform. So the aim was to centralise the online orders from different apps to a single app.

Finally, Canter launched Ordermark in January 2017, with six other co-founders, including Mike Jacob founder of TapInto and Paul Allen. The platform included all the locally running delivery services into one and chose Epson to develop a single printer to print every transaction in a similar format. Finally, Canter launched Ordermark in January 2017, with six other co-founders, including Mike Jacob founder of TapInto and Paul Allen. The platform included all the locally running delivery services into one and chose Epson to develop a single printer to print every transaction in a similar format.

With the Ordermark subscription, every restaurant receives a tablet and a printer. The service provided the users with a single dashboard, from where they could streamline the process of taking and processing the orders, such that there is no confusion and the customer service is improved.

Canter and his team helped restaurants with curating their menu and taught them how to use the platform. Also, the Ordermark created a pick-up zone for the delivery drivers.

Ordermark raised a $3.1 million series round led by TenOneTen Ventures, Act One Ventures, and Mucker Capital and a $9.5 million Series A round led by Nosara Capital in 2018. The company raised to 35 employees and 500 signed up restaurants in the same year serving in twenty states in the U.S.

Ordermark Today

Today the company has got four offices in different parts of the U.S. It has gained over 3000 signups from various restaurants, including TGI Friday’s, Qdoba, Veggie Grill, Dickey’s Barbecue Pit, Yogurtland, Johnny Rockets, and Sonic. In July 2019, the company raised an $18 million in a new round of funding. The company intends to target the already running 1 million restaurants, and the ones that will be opened in the coming future.

Alex Canter’s unique idea brought him success in his 20s, which is a great achievement for a person just graduated and a dream for many. For his early achievement, he got his name listed in Forbes 30 Under 30.

grubhub

GrubHub : One of the Top Ten Online Food Delivery Services Of United States

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Be it a lazy Sunday or a tiring Tuesday, at times we don’t really wish to step out of our house for dinner. But who can stop the craving for good food? In those cases, the online food delivery services have become the real saviour.

GrubHub is one such online food delivery marketplace that has made the life of diners better and easier. Long before Zomato, Uber Eats or Foopanda stepped into the business of mobile food delivery; Grubhub was launched in the United States. It is one of the most famous and oldest online food delivery platforms that serve in the cities of the United States and London. The company was founded in 2004 by Matt Maloney and Mike Evans, with its headquarters based in Chicago, Illinois, United States.

Matt Maloney

Matt graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University and did his MBA from the University of Chicago. He currently serves GrubHub as the CEO. Apart from his leadership in Grubhub, he is also an advisory board member in The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship. He is also a member of ChicagoNEXT, an organization established to nurture the young entrepreneurs of Chicago.

GrubHub founders
Image Source: businessinsider.com

Mike Evans

Mike graduated from MIT and wrote the first version of GrubHub in 2004. After the company followed a very tempting growth trajectory with his and Maloney’s contributions, Evans left it to try something new. He also wrote a science fiction novel and launched a new company, Fixer in 2017.

History

After the launch of GrubHub in 2004, the co-founders won the first place for the business plan of GrubHub at the Edward L. Kaplan New Venture Challenge in University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 2006. This was the first victory of the company.

In 2007, the company raised a $1.1 million in the Series A funding led by Amicus Capital and Origin Ventures. This funding was used for expanding the business to San Francisco and New York markets. In 2009, another $2 million was raised in Series B funding which was led by Origin Ventures and Leo Capital. The funding received in Series C was five times the previous funding and was led by Benchmark Capital. In March 2011, the company raised $20 million in Series D funding hosted by DAG Ventures followed by raising another $50 million in Series E funding in the same year. The Series E funding was led by Lightspeed Ventures, and after this round of funding, the company acquired Dotmenu, the parent company of Campusfood and Allmenus. Both the funding and the acquisition made Grubhub’s position even stronger in the industry. In the same year, the company also acquired FanGo (a mobile ordering and payment solution provider).

In May 2013, Grubhub announced its merging with Seamless, its prime competitor in the market. The merged company planned to expand the business to more than 500 cities across the United States and take orders from more than 20,000 local restaurants. The signed agreement declared 58% of the share for Seamless and 42% for GrubHub. The agreement was finalized in August 2013.

In April 2014, the company went public for trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol ‘GRUB’.

In 2015, the company acquired Delivered Dish followed by the acquisition of LAbite in May 2016. Both companies provided restaurant delivery services. In 2017, it took over Eat24, a food ordering platform from Yelp. A lot of acquisitions by Grubhub took place in the next few years, which includes LevelUp and Tapingo.

In February 2018, the company launched RestaurantHER, an initiative to support nationwide restaurants that are led by women and expanded its partnership with Foursquare. In April 2018, the company expanded its business further to 34 markets across the nation.

In May 2019, GrubHub came in partnership with Smoothie King, world’s leading smoothie brand.

Marketing Strategy

The biggest strength of Grubhub is collaboration. This helped GrubHub in expanding and escalating the growth. The company came in collaboration with the majority of the local restaurant outlets rather than in-house production of food, which cuts the labour cost and increases the profit. There are around 80,000 restaurants in alliance with GrubHub, which helps to maintain its stability in today’s market.

The increasing number of competitors is a potential threat that leads to market saturation irrespective of the growing number of customers. In order to eliminate its competitor from the market, GrubHub either came in partnership with these companies or acquired them.

The company also provided bonuses and special benefits to highly rated customers. This lures more users to order food through GrubHub.

The hassle-free delivery where the diner can track his or her valet and multiple payment options also attracts many users.

Statistics

Currently, there are 19.3 million active users who use GrubHub to make online food orders from 115,000 restaurants located in different cities of the United States and London. Around 521,000 orders are processed every day.

Tony Xu : The Co-founder of the Dashing Food Delivery Service ‘DoorDash’

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The food industry is blooming with every second that passes. Now that the food industry has got technology-induced in it, one can order any kind of food, anytime, anywhere. It requires nothing but a simple three taps on your tech-savvy devices. In this growing food industry, DoorDash emerges as a key company leading the change. Tony Xu, the founding CEO of the company shares a success story which speaks that a simple problem can turn on the light in our minds to figure out something innovative.

DoorDash Inc. is an on-demand food delivery service which was founded in 2013 by Andy Fang, Stanley Tang, Tony Xu and Evan Moore. The founding story of DoorDash, as described by Tony, is an ‘unlikely one’.

It was 2012, and all four of the founders were working on an app which focused on building the technology for small businesses. They used to go and talk to the owners of coffee shops and restaurants. It all started when they were in a small macaroon store, in Palo Alto. The manager of the store, Chloe, expressed all the problems in her day to day business. However, as they were about to leave, Chloe showed them a thick booklet, which contained pages of delivery orders, and said, “This drives me crazy. I have no drivers to fulfil them, and I’m the one doing all of it.”

Tony Xu
Image Source: Bloomberg

All four of them had their lightbulb moment. They spent the next few weeks interviewing and questioning other small businesses (nearly 200) and heard the same thing over and over again: ‘Deliveries are painful’. They started coding keeping in mind that they can improve this backlog and were ready with their first prototype within a few hours.

On January 12th, 2013, Palo Alto Delivery was born. The service spread so quickly that all the four members were delivering all over the Stanford campus. In the day, they were students and, in the night, they were delivery drivers. The name ‘Palo Alto Delivery’ was changed to DoorDash, in June 2013, and the delivery drivers were called the ‘Dashers’. “We learnt so much from driving in the streets. Now, anyone who joins the company, has to be a Dasher for at least 1 week,” said Xu.

“When we first started, we were trying to solve our own problems of getting food delivered. But soon, it grew quickly within the Stanford community and beyond. We found out that many families and office workers in the area have the same problem. When we deliver food, it’s as much about delivering happiness as it is about bringing convenience,” DoorDash posted on Medium.

Tony Xu, is a first-generation American. His first job was at his mom’s restaurant. His education includes B.S. (High Honours) in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from UC Berkeley, M.B.A. from Stanford Graduate School of Business. He was an Arjay Miller Scholar at Stanford. He started his professional career at McKinsey and Company. After that, he worked in Product at Square and led special projects for CEO and CFO at eBay.

When he started DoorDash, his simple mission was to enable every merchant to deliver easily, and that mission has come a long way. DoorDash has drawn investments worth $700 million with key investors being: Khosla Ventures, SoftBank, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Kleiner Perkins Caufield, and Byers. During 2018, the company was valued at $1.4 billion in a round of funding.

In April 2018, DoorDash stepped into the grocery deliveries with a partnership with Walmart. Further, in the year, DoorDash surpassed Uber Eats to become the second largest company in US food delivery sales behind only GrubHub.

The company took everyone by surprise when its valuation took place in February 2019. The company’s value increased 5 times and valued $7 billion when the rounding was done by SoftBank, Vision Fund, DST Global and Y Combinator.

Tony Xu, has also kept the focus of the company on an issue very important to him personally. Project DASH was launched and has since focused on the efforts to save food from wastage.

“Today, more than four and a half years after we first launched the company, we’re still passionate about transforming local businesses helping them thrive in this digital and convenient economy.” Tony Xu, the founding CEO is leading his company with its dashing food delivery services to new heights and is setting an example in front of the world that if innovation stays, then progress to success will always be on the tracks.