Bengaluru-based, on-demand food-delivery platform Swiggy has lined its top deck with five Vice-Presidents to head Product, Design, Finance, HR and Marketing, with the view to take the company through its next phase of growth. The start-up is actively scouting for two Associate Vice-Presidents to lead engineering.
Founded in August 2014 and bootstrapped till January last year, Swiggy has hit a new high of delivering 50,000 orders a day, up from 3,500 orders a day last August, and has set itself a new target of 1 million orders a day by 2020.
Nandan Reddy, co-founder, Swiggy, told BusinessLine that the company is already profitable in two of its eight markets — Bengaluru and Hyderabad — and will now focus on achieving break-even status per order in the other cities within the next two quarters. Delhi, Gurugram, Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata and Chennai are the other markets that Swiggy operates in.
“We still have CXO-level positions open for COO, CMO and CFO, but are in no hurry to fill the positions as the VP-level hires will take Swiggy through the next phase of growth. We will focus on strengthening our position in the eight markets. For instance, a market like Bengaluru alone can take 3-4 lakh orders a day. In terms of geographic expansion, we are looking to add at the most three cities — Ahdmedabad, Jaipur and Chandigarh,” said Reddy.
Swiggy has over 5,000 restaurants on its platform and receives commissions ranging between 20-25 per cent for lead-generation plus deliveries from restaurants. “We drive 10 per cent of a restaurant’s business today, and are looking to take that up to 30 per cent. The average order-value on Swiggy is Rs. 330; we want to increase that to Rs. 400 in the next 12 months.”.
Swiggy offers features such as no minimum order value, for which customers have to pay a delivery fee. Delivery charges range ₹30-40, depending on the city. The company has its own delivery fleet size of 6,000 people.
The start-up has partnered with a third-party logistics provider Bike Ninja for peak-hour deliveries, which it has been piloting in its home market of Bengaluru for the last couple of months.
Swiggy, which has raised $60.5 million in funding, has witnessed 2.4 million downloads on Android and receives 85 per cent of its orders from its mobile app.