Swiggy to expand to 500 cities; reveals plan to reach 100 more by year-end

Foodtech unicorn Swiggy on Monday announced it had solidified its presence in 500 cities across the country, and that it is planning to expand to 600 cities by December 2019. With this expansion, more than 350 million or one in four Indians now have access to the food delivery platform.

Founded in 2014 by Sriharsha Majety, Nandan Reddy, and Rahul Jaimini, the footech startup was able to comfortably penetrate into Tier III and IV cities of the country, after marking its presence in the metropolitans and Tier II cities.

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In the last month alone, the platform has launched in 130 cities like Himmatnagar and Vyara in Gujarat, Sirsi and Bagalkot in Karnataka, Sawantwadi and Sangamner in Maharashtra, Puri in Odisha, Behror in Rajasthan, Hindupur in Andhra Pradesh, Bankura in West Bengal, Ramanathapuram and Sivakasi in Tamil Nadu, Nagaon and Johrat in Assam.

Vivek Sunder, the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Swiggy, said,

"Enabling restaurants with added revenue and building Swiggy Access Kitchens for our restaurant partners to expand to small towns will bring better quality food closer to every consumer. Our growing fleet of over 2.1 lakh active delivery partners have more income opportunities due to the scale and offerings of Swiggy."

Besides expanding to smaller towns, Swiggy also announced it has expanded its service to over 75 universities including IIT Roorkee, NIT Kurukshetra, IIT Kharagpur, NIT Calicut, BITS Pilani, and Lovely Professional University (LPU) among others. Situated in the outskirts of larger cities, the universities usually do not have access to the convenience of food delivery.

It also reported that it had on-boarded 60,000 new restaurants in the last six months, and through its Launchpad programme, Swiggy has entered more than 75 universities in the country. The company believes that students are its strongest brand ambassadors, and that it intends to leverage upon it by launching in more than 200 universities by end of year.

As of today, Swiggy has around 2.1 lakh active delivery partners and connects its customers to over 1,40,000 restaurant partners.

(Edited by Megha Reddy)

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