Swiggy piles pressure on Zomato with $15m from Bessemer

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Food delivery app Swiggy has raised fresh funding worth US$15 million from Bessemer Venture Partners as it makes an aggressive push in hiring and tech investments to take on bigger rival Zomato.

Founded in August 2014, Swiggy bootstrapped till January 2015. The Bangalore-based startup raised US$35 million in January, then helping turn the tide in an otherwise dismal sector.

See: Swiggy cooks up $35m funding, proves India’s food startups aren’t toxic

The fresh funds will be used to prop up Swiggy’s hiring, improve customer experience, as well as get more restaurants on its platform, the company said.

The startup also has plans to experiment with getting into the high margin world of in-house cooking. If successful, that would make it more than an aggregator, and rival cloud kitchens.

Swiggy is currently in eight cities and claims to have over 9,000 restaurant partners on its platform. Delhi-based Zomato, which started off as a restaurant discovery site, claims to have over 1 million restaurants globally, and is operational in 23 countries across the world, including the UAE, New Zealand, and Australia.

Zomato has, however, been struggling with some missteps as the once-unicorn chased international dominance, making its core business suffer. Zomato has since said it has shifted focus to bettering its app and core platform.