Food ordering and delivery platform Swiggy has put its expansion on a fast track, ramping up the national network to 245 cities from 17 in a mere 12 months while the restaurant partner network has been scaled up three times to 1.1 lakh.

It has also expanded its delivery fleet from 14,000 delivery partners to 2.05 lakh during the same period.

The start-up, which entered the Unicorn league of companies last June when it last raised funding, adopted a multi-pronged strategy to expand its reach across the country.

“Our data revealed that 5,000 people who had downloaded our app from 300 different cities and towns were asking ‘where are you?’ These are people who had registered on our app but had not purchased, as Swiggy was not available in their areas. To cater to this demand, we set up a special team of six youngsters whose task was to figure out how to launch Swiggy in these 300 new locations,” Vivek Sunder, COO, Swiggy told BusinessLine .

The team came up with multiple business models to launch Swiggy in the new cities/towns including the traditional model, where the start-up would have to physically go to each city to set up an office/team to get restaurant partners onboarded, which was done for Mysuru in Karnataka. The satellite model, which the start-up adopted to launch in Hosur which is part of Tamil Nadu but is a suburb or satellite of Bengaluru, by running it from Bengaluru. The University model called Launchpad, where the start-up ties up with universities targeting captive students on campus to deliver quality food to them. Lastly, the local partner/franchisee model that Swiggy works with to launch operations in small cities and towns.

“The vast majority of our scale-up happened using the first three business models. If we had resorted to just the traditional model, we couldn’t have scaled up so fast. We are aiming to launch in 100 new cities/towns in the next 12 months,” said Sunder.

Launchpad, which kicked off in January this year, is currently operational across 40 plus campuses, including IIT-Kharagpur, IIT-Roorkee, BITS (all three campuses), NIT Calicut, NIT Surathkal, and has seen over 1.25 lakh transactions.

“The aim is to have Launchpad across 150 campuses by the end of 2019,” said Sunder. Rival Zomato has also scaled up from 25 cities last June to 437 today.

New services

Swiggy has started launching new services that go beyond its core offerings of food ordering and delivery, taking on BigBasket, Grofers, Amazon Now and even Dunzo.

For instance, Swiggy Stores, a new on-demand delivery service in Gurugram, was launched earlier this year. Stores is part of the Swiggy app to deliver everyday needs including fruits, vegetables, flowers, groceries, medicines etc to customers from stores in their vicinity. Last month, Swiggy Daily, a home-style meal subscription service, was launched in Gurugram that gives consumers access to a variety of home cooked meals prepared by home chefs, tiffin service providers and organised vendors.

The start-up is currently running 10 pilots in different locations across the country including a C2C service called Swiggy Go to facilitate pick-up and drop services, much like Dunzo already does. Franchisee pilots to launch in smaller towns; new private brand pilots in addition to its two private brands - The Bowl Co and Homely and pilots of dishes made exclusively for Swiggy by restaurant partners, among others are currently in the experiment stage.

Asked about Swiggy’s future, Sunder said: “We aspire to be the “King of Convenience” where we remove consumer pain points with our great technology-fuelled logistics backbone. We were the first to provide live tracking of food delivery and we deliver in 32 minutes. We are now naturally extending the convenience of food delivery to other areas like delivering medicines, groceries, bread etc as we already have our delivery fleet and other logistics in place.”

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