Swiggy on Wednesday said that it is expecting solid growth in the next 3-5 years and plans to expand its geographical footprint and store network for Instamart. It said it has doubled the categories for quick commerce in the last 12 months. “We will continue to invest in various categories,” CEO Sriharsha Majety said post the listing ceremony of Swiggy.
Majety said that Instamart’s average delivery time has reduced over time in big cities from 17 minutes to 12 minutes. He added that the company plans to open bigger dark stores of as much as 8,000-10,000 sq ft.
On the reported CCI probe, Majety said, “We are following laws and practices with complete compliance.”
Majety also shared the story of how he started the food-tech unicorn by recalling his student days at IIM Calcutta. “I completely forgot about it after that college project finished. And then came across it again in a very different way, without knowing it,” he shared. “For that idea to have first gotten executed is in itself a rarity. But to execute it at the size and scale that we have right now is an absolute miracle,” he added.
At a recent press meet in Bengaluru, Majety recounted starting Swiggy’s operations in 2014 with Nandan Reddy, his batchmate from BITS Pilani and Rahul Jaimini, the third co-founder and head of technology. Before meeting Jaimini, Majety and Reddy were building a courier aggregation platform called Bundl, but later chose to get out of that business. “Probably in hindsight that was the best decision we’ve taken in the last 10-plus years,” he said.
Within 3 months of launch, Swiggy had hit a scale of about 40 orders a day and a monthly gross merchandise volume of Rs 3.5 lakh in October 2014, the firm said in a blog post. It had gone live with 25 restaurants in Koramangala with an average delivery time of 35 minutes and with customers ordering an average of 4 times every month.
With the IPO, Majety and Reddy likely gained Rs 68 crore each, as they pledged up to 0.78% of their stakes. Jaimini, who has moved on from the management, likely gained Rs 45 crore, with a stake dilution of 0.52%.
Not just the founders, but top executives and nearly 500 employees are set to see massive gains through the listing. While 5,000 former and present employees are holding a total employee stock option plan (ESOP) pool worth Rs 9,000 crore, among them nearly 500 are set to see gains of above Rs 1 crore. Moreover, as many as 70 former and current employees stand to make more than Rs 8.5 crore each, as per reports.
Earlier this year, Swiggy had secured an exemption from SEBI to allow its employees to sell shares only one month after the listing, unlike the usual lock-in period of one year.