Swiggy Grows Instamart Express Grocery With $700M in Capital

Food delivery startup Swiggy is backing its express grocery delivery platform Instamart with $700 million of fresh capital, according to a statement on Thursday (Dec. 2).

Headquartered in Bangalore, Karnataka, India, Swiggy is also in the process of raising somewhere between $600 million to $700 million in a funding round led by Invesco that values the delivery startup at $10.5 billion, sources told Bloomberg on Wednesday (Dec. 1). Swiggy was last valued at $5.6 billion in July.

Swiggy is anticipated to become the first private company to achieve decacorn status — a valuation of $10 billion or more —by the end of 2021, PYMNTS reported.

See also: India’s Swiggy in Talks to Raise $800M From Investors

Swiggy’s Instamart, which was founded last year in Gurugram and Bangalore, services 18 cities, according to the statement. The service is on track to hit an “annual gross merchandise value run rate of $1 billion in the next three quarters,” noted CEO Sriharsha Majety, pointing to the business’ current growth trajectory.

Backed by big players like SoftBank Group, Goldman Sachs, Prosus, Falcon Edge, Accel and others, Swiggy’s biggest rival is Zomato, which is backed by Ant Financial and Tiger Global. Zomato went public earlier this year in a $1.3 billion initial public offering (IPO).

Read more: Swiggy Considers Branching Into India’s Social Commerce Space

Instamart is a feature on the main Swiggy app and enables users to order groceries from the company’s dark stores for fast delivery, usually in 15 to 30 minutes. The company aims to achieve 15-minute deliveries as a standard.

“With our food delivery business trending at a $3 billion annualized GMV run rate, and Instamart’s super-charged growth, we’re very excited about our convenience mission coming to life in a very big way,” Majety said.

The food delivery portion of Swiggy’s business is now 30% larger than pre-pandemic levels, PYMNTS reported.

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