Case Study - Swiggy's Delivery Model

Shubhanjali Chakravarty
Former Research Associate, IBS Hyderabad (Under IFHE - A Deemed to be University u/s 3 of the UGC Act, 1956), Hyderabad, Telangana, India. E-mail: shubhanjali@icmrindia.org

Sanjib Dutta
Research Lead, Case Research Center, IBS Hyderabad (Under IFHE - A Deemed to be University u/s 3 of the UGC Act, 1956), Hyderabad, Telangana, India. E-mail: sanjibdutta@icmrindia.org

The case study "Swiggy's Delivery Model" discusses how online food delivery company Swiggy used technology to power its delivery model. Swiggy was the brainchild of two engineers who were staying away from home and were struggling to get good food delivered at their doorstep. The duo worked on the idea of hasslefree food delivery, giving rise to Swiggy in 2014. Swiggy initially started taking online orders from customers in the Koramangala locality in Bengaluru which housed some of the best restaurants in the city. It gradually expanded across Bengaluru and other Indian cities like Delhi, Pune, Gurgaon, Hyderabad, and more. It launched its mobile application in May 2015. The case describes how Swiggy created a system that connected all the three partners in the delivery model - Delivery Executives (DEs), customers, and restaurant partners - seamlessly. The case also discusses the challenges Swiggy encountered when it began scaling up in 2016 and the initiatives such as Just in Time (JIT) assignment, Next Order Assignment (NOA), and batching that it took to overcome the challenges. The case concludes with Swiggy's plans for the future such as diversifying into medicines and grocery and the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology for further scaling up and expansion.

Swiggy's goal is to revolutionize the food delivery market in India by providing a cheap, fast and efficient alternative to taxing the already short-staffed restaurateurs. There are several existing and even more upcoming food-ordering platforms in the country. However, Swiggy sets itself apart from the competitors by having their own delivery fleet, thereby minimizing the risks in delivering an order.¹

- Sriharsha Majety (Majety), Co-Founder and CEO of Swiggy, in 2019

Introduction
On December 20, 2018, India-based online food delivery company Swiggy raised $1bn in the largest-ever funding round by an Indian food tech startup. Post that round, Swiggy's valuation went up to $3.3 bn.²

Since its inception in August 2014, Swiggy had focused on creating a robust delivery model consisting of its own fleet of Delivery Executives (DEs). Swiggy's founders realized early on that to deliver the best on-demand consumer experience, Swiggy had to have its own delivery model in place rather than depend upon a third party delivery partner. Swiggy aimed to create a robust delivery model initially through its website and subsequently through the launch of its mobile application in 2015.

However, Swiggy faced challenges in delivering on time when the company began scaling up in 2016. As a response, it recreated its delivery model by bringing in the Just in Time (JIT) assignment method (to ensure timely delivery of the order), Next Order Assignment (NOA) (to reduce the time taken by DEs at the restaurant waiting for the order), and batching (for increasing the efficiency of a DE by getting him to deliver multiple orders in less time).

As of 2019, Swiggy was focusing more on using digital technologies to enhance its delivery model. It invested in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to enhance its delivery capacity. Swiggy also planned to invest in groceries and medicines. It remains to be seen how the company would defend its position in the online food delivery market, which is projected to reach $161.74 bn by 2023³, as new players entered the market.

A Brief History of Swiggy
In 2012, Majety, a BITS Pilani and IIM Calcutta alumnus who worked as a trader at an investment bank in the UK, met Nandan Reddy (Reddy), another BITS Pilani alumnus. Reddy was working as a consultant and had built a startup "Galla" around a tablet-based Point-of- Sale (POS)⁴ for restaurants after heading operations of SourcePilani, India's first rural Business Process Outsourcing (BPO).⁵

During 2012-2013, both Majety and Reddy came together to build a platform called "Bundl", a logistics aggregator for e-commerce companies. However, things did not work out quite the way Majety and Reddy wanted and Bundl was shut down in June 2014. But, working on Bundl and tracking the logistics space made both realize the potential of hyperlocal delivery in the Indian metros. After the shutdown of Bundl, Majety and Reddy planned to get into hyperlocal delivery.

Both Majety and Reddy stayed away from home and had to order food from restaurants on an everyday basis. There were no players offering a complete food-ordering and delivery solution in the segment apart from Zomato and Foodpanda.com (Foodpanda), but they too depended upon their delivery partners (restaurants) to deliver food to their customers. Majety and Reddy were now convinced that they needed to work on the idea of hassle-free food delivery. Majety said, "When already we decided to shut Bundl, we knew we have to dive into hyperlocal delivery and give it a shot. We also understood that ordering platforms for restaurants were very broken. Ordering food has always been a big hassle, and hence, we decided to take the plunge and fix it"⁶

Rahul Jaimini (Jaimini), an IIT-Kharagpur alumnus who had left his job as a developer at Myntra Logistics (Myntra) and was eyeing entrepreneurial opportunities, also joined Majety and Reddy. Together, they named their venture, "Swiggy" (meaning, unbelievably legit and real), a food ordering and delivery company based out of Koramangala, Bengaluru's startup hub. Swiggy started its operations in August 2014 by signing up with a few restaurants in Koramangala. It raised its first round of funding in May 2015, and secured $2 mn from venture financing companies, Accel⁷, and SAIF Partners.⁸, ⁹ The same month, it came up with its mobile application, which was designed as an on-demand food ordering and delivery platform through which customers could place food orders from their preferred restaurant(s), and get the orders delivered within 40 min.¹⁰ Swiggy was operating in 11 neighborhoods in Bengaluru by May 2015 and it spread out all over the city over next two months. It had tied up with more than 300 restaurants and was delivering 1,000 plus orders on an everyday basis.¹¹ From July 2015, Swiggy started expanding across India, covering Pune, Mumbai, Gurgaon, Delhi, and Hyderabad.¹²

In 2015, Swiggy had 650 DEs from diverse backgrounds-college students, who worked part-time and full-time employees. By the end of 2015, it had hired over 12,000 DEs. Swiggy developed its technology keeping in mind the "changing requirements based on geography, logistics, etc."¹³ The technology was developed entirely in-house. As of June 2019, Swiggy connected consumers to over 100,000 restaurant partners across over 200 cities in India. By using technology, it aimed to provide a hassle-free, fast, and reliable delivery experience. Every order delivered by Swiggy's 0.195 million active delivery fleet, the largest in India, ensured quick delivery, no minimum order value, live order tracking, and 24/7 customer support.¹⁴

Swiggy's Delivery Model Powered by Technology In order to ensure that food was delivered on time, Swiggy introduced live order tracking. Like other on-demand delivery startups, Swiggy too integrated the Google Maps application program interface¹⁵ (API) which let the customers know where their order was and how much time it would take for the order to be delivered. That allowed them to track the DE's current location with accuracy.¹⁶

Swiggy aimed to offer an integrated ordering solution by deploying multiple proprietary applications, including a vendor management application provided to restaurant partners and a delivery application powered by routing algorithms, provided to driver partners. When a consumer placed an order with Swiggy through the iOS or Android applications or website, the order was immediately transmitted to the merchant and the DE, based on availability and distance from the restaurant.

The merchant confirmed receipt of the order and prepared the food, while the DE reached the restaurant JIT to collect the prepared food and deliver it to the customer. Swiggy's in-app navigation was made to facilitate hassle-free delivery. According to Jaimini, "The technological backbone of Swiggy, the start-up's delivery fleet is powered by algorithm-enabled smartphones that are constantly enforcing more efficient ways to complete deliveries."¹⁷

Swiggy concentrated on establishing coordination between the consumers, restaurants, and the DEs. This triad constituted a separate marketplace in a hyper-local setting for Swiggy (refer to Figure 1 for interconnection in the market place). That meant that at every given location in which it operated, there had to be a critical mass of consumers, restaurants, and DEs at all times to deliver an optimal experience. The demand from consumers also needed

to match with the supply of restaurants available in the area to enable delivery within a reasonable time. And that required the management to maintain real-time accurate information.

The Swiggy application for the customers was designed to offer a simple interface and a hassle-free customer experience. Once the application was installed and the customer signed in, various restaurants were listed, to help the customer decide where to order from and what (refer to Figure 2 for the design of Swiggy's mobile application). As Swiggy was a real-time platform (the actual time during which a process or event occurs), the application opened with thousands of options instantaneously like customers' food preferences, the restaurants present in the customers' area, different cuisines, and the ranges across all the price points. The application also provided a live snapshot of the DE in the customers' area.¹⁸

After the customer placed an order and the restaurant had confirmed it, the assignment algorithm looked into factors like assigning a DE to an order accordingly and the best route for him to follow. A broadcast signal was then sent to all the drivers in the vicinity who had their own driver application. Those willing to accept the order could choose to accept it on the application.

Swiggy's communication engine was a decentralized system. That pattern worked well when the teams were small but while scaling up, Swiggy encountered difficulties in its communication channels relating to uncertainties in dish-preparation times, the DE's familiarity with the area and speed, and changing traffic conditions, to name a few. Hence, Swiggy's founders felt the need for a centralized platform to cater to the needs of the large teams in the company.

With the help of Big Data analytics and software developers, Swiggy resolved its pain points and built a system as a rational business communication engine, which helped users to use a "rendering engine to build templates and send communications to users via multiple channels"¹⁹. The system helped track open rates and Click Through Actions (CTAs) and conversions, but the system worked independently without depending upon other programs.²⁰ A software developer at Swiggy said, "This seemed like a good idea, as the communication engine will become an isolated system with no dependency on any other system. This system was designed to be a push based system, where other services will send an event to the platform, which will then send it ahead. The whole process will be asynchronous with users having an option to either provide a webhook or a queue (topic) if they want to know when communication was routed if there is a high requirement for consistency."²¹

Business Model and Expansion
Swiggy earned some part of its revenues from commissions. It charged a 15%-25% commission on the order bill amount received by the restaurant. This commission was calculated on the full bill amount which was inclusive of the Goods and Service Tax²² (GST) charged over and above the menu price. However, the company often aimed to get restaurants to be available on Swiggy exclusively. For this, it gave certain benefits to the restaurants like greater visibility (with the restaurants appearing on the application more number of times) and its commissions sometimes being cut by 2-3% (refer to Figure 3 for business model of Swiggy).

Swiggy did not have a minimum order requirement for delivery. That meant it often received orders for less than 100. That increased the logistics cost per order. However, the company started charging delivery fees after 2016 which depended upon the geographical location of the restaurants and the cities they were located in. Delivery charges typically amounted to around 20 for orders less than 250. Swiggy also introduced surge pricing in 2016 in times of high demand, rains, and special occasions and midnight delivery in select markets. It also earned from advertising, banner promotions (promotion of restaurants in its application and website pertaining to regions), and priority listing of restaurants. Swiggy tapped its revenue stream by charging a premium from restaurants in return for giving priority listing to them. The higher up the list the restaurant was displayed, the higher was the fee the restaurant had to pay.

Swiggy also earned through "Affiliate Income" by referring credit cards to its customers. The company partnered with financial institutions and banks like American Express, Citibank, ICICI Bank, HSBC, etc. to sell their credit cards to the customers.

In January 2017, Swiggy launched its own cloud kitchen service²³ in Bengaluru named "The Bowl Company", which offered a limited menu. In March 2017, Swiggy's services were

expanded to Delhi-NCR, including Faridabad, Noida Expressway, and Greater Noida. In April 2017, it introduced post-midnight delivery till 2 a.m. in Delhi-NCR, and Hyderabad. In July 2017, Swiggy marked five million monthly orders. In November 2017, it launched "Swiggy Access", a central kitchen base-like facility which housed kitchens of different restaurants including Swiggy's private labels, "House of Dabbas" and "Punjabi Rasoi" in Bengaluru. Swiggy Access was its first virtual kitchen facility for existing restaurant partners, which served as a central base for delivery with five kitchens of different restaurants. As of 2019, Swiggy Access was available in four metros in the country with kitchens in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Hyderabad and Swiggy planned to on-board new restaurants in over 30 cities by 2020. As of 2019, about 8%-25% of the order volumes at Swiggy came through its Access kitchens.

Swiggy also launched "Swiggy Pop" in 2017 to offer food delivery to singles. As on 2019, Swiggy Pop was available in seven major Indian cities - Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata and Delhi.²⁴ In February 2018, Swiggy launched 'Swiggy Scheduled', which allowed users to plan and order their meals in advance. In July 2018, Swiggy rolled out its subscription model "Swiggy Super" with a monthly and quarterly plan priced between 99 and 149. Swiggy Super offered unlimited free delivery on orders above 99 with no surge pricing applicable if a customer had already opted for Swiggy Super.

Delivery Challenges
While creating an exhaustive and hassle-free delivery model, Swiggy faced challenges on a daily basis from the DEs and restaurant partners. The first kind of challenge for Swiggy was to fix the problem of restaurant listing and the delivery time promise. Whenever a customer opened the Swiggy application, a query was sent to the delivery system regarding the serviceability of restaurants to the customer and the expected time of the order from the potential restaurant. But the expected time was difficult for many of the restaurants to estimate due to their geographical locations.

The second challenge pertained to the feasibility of finding all the restaurants such that a DE could reach there, pick up the order and deliver it to the customer on time. Swiggy faced difficulties in assignment delay, first mile (time required to arrive at the restaurant), preparation time (time required to prepare the food), and last mile (time taken to reach the customer). The third challenge was the central delivery equation or the dilemma in finding just the right length of time to ensure delivery, which would not be so long that it would discourage the customer from placing an order and also providing an ample choice of restaurants to the customer so that the delivery time remained as quick as possible.²⁵

Cracking the Delivery Challenges
However, Swiggy cracked the delivery challenges and brought changes in its existing environment by taking certain measures. To ascertain and resolve the problem of delivery timing, Swiggy brought in the technique of JIT Assignment (a way to minimize the time spent by the DE at the restaurant waiting for the food to be prepared"²⁶). Through JIT, Swiggy earmarked the DE available nearest the restaurant to pick up the order and service its customers. The engineers at Swiggy came out with a new model. Under this model, when the order was received, rather than dispatching the DE immediately to the restaurant, Swiggy earmarked him for the delivery (according to Swiggy executives, the preparation of food took longer than the time it took for a DE to reach the restaurant, which meant the DE would waste his time waiting at the restaurant to receive the food). Likewise, by allotting a DE on a JIT basis, Swiggy took care of the timely delivery of the order and sent the DE to pick up multiple orders in one go, thus ensuring timely deliveries. And Swiggy could use one DE for multiple orders.

However, Swiggy executives faced challenges in earmarking and execution during peak time loads (like during office hours or in the evenings). To resolve that issue, Swiggy adopted the technique of NOA (a way to minimize the time spent by the DE waiting to be assigned to the next order and increasing the potential pool of executives considered for an order²⁷). For instance, if a DE could deliver his first order (O1) within 10 min of picking up the order from the restaurant and was 5 min away from the restaurant preparing the second order (O2) (where estimated preparation time was 20 min), the DE could clearly finish delivering O1 and then pick up O2 in time. An analyst at Swiggy opined, "However, while this is a great way to increase the pool of eligible executives and at the same time reduce the wait times at the Restaurant, it largely depends on the accuracy of the prediction for when the executive will get free. Because, if the DE takes longer than what was estimated to get free, then the order is unacceptably delayed."²⁸

Swiggy also adopted, "Batching" (A way to increase the efficiency of DEs by delivering more than one order at a time²⁹). If a restaurant received two orders at the same time from two customers located near each other, Swiggy dispatched a single DE to deliver both orders. That helped increase the number of orders significantly and ensured delivery with a fixed set of DEs. Devansh Gupta, executive at the delivery team at Swiggy, said, "Cracking the food delivery challenge, not only requires us to come up with creative solutions to hard problems, but also requires us to get an in-depth understanding of how the entire ecosystem behaves in the real world, to ensure we make the right trade-offs".³⁰

In 2018, Swiggy launched a program, "Swiggy Packaging Assist' to enable packaging solutions on its platform as a move to diversify its play in the food technology sector. The initiative was taken to offer restaurants access to a variety of packing solutions for their menu needs with about 30 products to begin with. The marketplace connected restaurants with vendors of these materials and offered eco-friendly and food grade certified materials including leak-proof, sturdy, stackable, eco-friendly and heat insulant packaging materials. Vendors on the marketplace offered discounts of up to 5% to restaurants opting for these solutions.³¹

Business Performance and Competition
In the FY 2018, Swiggy's revenues rose to 4.42 bn up from 1.33 bn in FY 2017, as it continuously expanded its geographic footprint across the country. Swiggy had expanded its operations from seven cities in March 2017 to 12 by March 2018, even as order volumes had increased by three times during the period. Swiggy ended September 2017 with more than 21 million orders in absolute terms.³²

However, amidst the growing revenues, Swiggy also increased its losses manifold to 3.97 bn in FY 2018 up from 2.05 bn in FY 2017, as it had to spend heavily on funding discounting and low-cost deliveries.³³ In 2018, Swiggy led the online food delivery market in India with a 35-38% market share, followed by Zomato at 25-30%, according to a report from Red Seer Consulting, an Internet-focused consulting firm in India.³⁴

According to company officials, in 2017-18, Swiggy "focused on delivering exceptional value to users, while investing significantly for the future and improving operational efficiencies".³⁵

Majety further opined, "We are being fairly measured about our own dependence on these things (discounting) to drive business and its super important to keep building a real long-term, sustainable business. We will react in ways to be competitive, but it's not our focus area to figure out ways to spend on discounts. For us, it is well under control and probably a few quarters of such behavior is to be expected because of new players who are trying to win market share suddenly."³⁶

Swiggy's biggest rival was Zomato. Uber Eats and Ola's Foodpanda had not been expanding due to heavy losses and the cash burnt by them respectively. And both the companies had rolled back investments in their food businesses.³⁷

Other companies like TinyOwl, Dazo, Spoonjoy, Eatlo, and EatOnGo had shut down operations after incurring heavy losses. That made Zomato the biggest competitor of Swiggy as of 2019 with revenues worth 4.46 bn, as of FY2018.

Swiggy had started delivering food (using its own fleet) since its inception in 2014, whereas Zomato started its own delivery fleet a little late in February 2015 (after Swiggy's launch). It continued to depend upon its restaurant partners (for food delivery), from its inception in 2008 till February 2015. Changing rules, delayed deliveries, problems with the restaurant partners and problems with training and retaining staff were the issues that affected Zomato's growth and prompted it to go in for its own fleet like Swiggy.


Swiggy had been catching up fast with Zomato in terms of revenue and expansion (refer to Figure 4 for revenue growth of Zomato and Swiggy). According to Majety, "We do our basic service really well. We are boringly predictable. Our hope is there should be no touch points between a customer and us beyond them placing the order on the app and us handing over the food to them. It is a challenging business and we were able to get the basic service

right through a mix of technology and operational excellence. One of the big contributors was having our own fleet. We had five riders when we started; we have crossed 20,000 riders now. We have India's largest last-mile delivery fleet."³⁸

As on 2019, Swiggy was focusing on increasing its order intake capacity and apart from the restaurant chains and bigger players, it was also collaborating with small restaurant owners, (who formed a big part of the unorganized restaurant business). For many small restaurants, Swiggy was the primary route through which orders flowed into their restaurants.

As the competition between Swiggy and Zomato heated up, both increased the salaries of DEs from 10,000- 25,000 per month to 25,000 to 50,000 per month from July 2018. Ujjwal Chaudhry, engagement manager, e-tailing, at RedSeer, said, "With such fast growth, there are challenges for the companies to fulfil which leads to higher pay out to DEs. It is a short-term trend and cannot be a sustainable strategy because any hyperlocal industry is tight on unit economics and they cannot keep burning money,"³⁹ Both the companies had been eyeing expansion and Swiggy had already burned cash on its marketing, advertisements, discounts, and low-cost deliveries, to remain ahead of Zomato in FY 2019.

Testing New Waters
In June 2019, Swiggy announced its entry into the home chef space with the launch of a new venture, 'Swiggy Daily', an application to give consumers access to a variety of simple home style meals prepared by home chefs, tiffin service providers, and organized vendors.⁴⁰ "Swiggy Daily" was expected to list over 30 options for every meal. The platform would include meal options from a mix of organized vendors like Homely, Lunchly, Fig, iDabba, and Caloriesmart; popular tiffin services like Dial a Meal and Dailymeals.in that specialized in food fit for daily consumption, and expert home chefs like Sumita's Food Planet, Mrs. Ahmed's Kitchen and Shachi Jain. This was expected to be a separate application of Swiggy focusing on providing customers with lunch and dinner options.

Swiggy Daily would be a subscription-based service which aimed to deliver food with order values ranging between 50 and 150 without a delivery fee. According to Majety, "There is a growing demand for quality and affordable everyday meals. With a mix of organized vendors and home chefs, Swiggy Daily will cater to this latent demand for homestyle meals that are an affordable, long-term solution for our daily food needs."⁴¹

In February 2019, Swiggy also announced the launch of "Swiggy Stores" in Gurugram. Swiggy Stores aimed to deliver different products from 3,500 stores in Gurugram, and had partnered with 200 stores in categories like Kiranas and supermarkets, fresh meat, baby stores, and health supplement stores among others. It had also partnered with Licious, The Mom's CO, and Apollo Pharma, to name a few.⁴²

In 2019, Swiggy became the first aggregator to offer the 30 min or free delivery feature to customers. It was available at select restaurants in select cities but it solved a huge pain point of customers having to wait for 40-60 min for their food to be delivered. Once it was fully launched-Swiggy would bear 70%-80% of the cost in case it failed to deliver on time while the rest would be borne by the restaurants.

Future Plans
As of 2019, Swiggy was looking to further strengthen its tech efforts and focus on an AIdriven delivery platform for hyperlocal and on-demand delivery. According to Dale Vaz (Vaz), Head of Engineering and Data Science at Swiggy, "The first big tech challenge was moving from a food tech stack to a platform in the hyperlocal category. Today, even though we support food, we should able to do the same for other things like buying medicines, grocery, pet food, etc. With our AI-first approach, we are looking at how can we replace and rethink Swiggy products, and replace some of our hard-coded system assumptions with intelligent AI-based systems. We are doing this across the board to look at how Swiggy can become an AI-first product. Last year, we hired multiple PhDs from international universities, and tenured people from places like IBM and GE Research as senior scientists."⁴³ Swiggy had also focused on building a dedicated applied research team that would be separate from the data science team. That team would focus on areas around voice, vision, and Natural Language Processing (NLP). According to Vaz, "The thinking is that there is a team that will look at immediate problems while the applied research will look at how to solve for the next set of 100 million customers."⁴⁴

Swiggy had been building data infrastructure since 2017. It also worked on the Swiggy data platform, which housed all the data (from customers, drivers and restaurants with 40 billion messages per day) that flowed through the Swiggy network. The company also aimed to build the Swiggy AI stack and intelligence models based upon that. Swiggy sought to build long-term capability as well by partnering with external research institutes and industries. According to Vaz, "We have partnered with universities to enable this kind of research under a grant program where Swiggy can fund that research."⁴⁵

Swiggy also aimed to democratize AI across the organization to build models around it. Vaz opined, "We launched this program called 'AI for All' where we are training our teams, analysts, and even business leaders. Eventually, our vision is to make AI a part of our culture where we have built the capability and knowledge in the organization."⁴⁶

As of 2019, Swiggy was looking to make inroads into the non-food business. Majety opined, "We've been closely observing our consumers' lives and we feel that there are some unique capabilities that we have that can take a shot at solving more problems, even outside the realm of food. You'll see us start making small forays into new areas."⁴⁷

Notes

1. Ryan Frantz, "How Swiggy, India's Largest Food Delivery Service, Delivers a Better Customer Experience with Sumo Logic," yourstory.com, June 2019.
2. Durba Ghosh, "Timeline: How Late-Entrant Swiggy Became India's, Most Valued Food-Tech Startup," qz.com, December 2018.
3. "Online Food Delivery Market to Hit $161.74 Billion by 2023 - Global and Regional (US, UK, China, India, etc.) Industry Strategy and Statistic Analysis: Adroit Market Research," www.globenewswire.com, 2019.
4. Point-of-Sale (POS) is a physical location (place, shop or store) at which goods are sold to customers. POS terminal is a computerized replacement for a cash register.
5. Alok Soni, "Bengaluru-Based Swiggy Takes Food Ordering and Delivery Hyperlocal, Secures $2 Million Funding," yourstory.com, April 2015.
6. "A Start-Up by IIM, IIT Grads to Quickly Deliver Food from Restaurants!," www.rediff.com, July 2015.
7. Accel, formerly known as Accel Partners, is an American venture capital firm. It was founded in 1983 in California, US.
8. SAIF Partners is a stage and sector agnostic private equity firm in Asia. It was founded in 2001 in China.
9. Alok Soni, op. cit.
10. "Swiggy Business Model | How Does Swiggy Make Money," bstrategyhub.com, 2014.
11. Alok Soni, op. cit.
12. "What's the Swiggy Story?," careers.swiggy.com
13. "A Start-Up by IIM, IIT Grads to Quickly Deliver Food from Restaurants!," www.rediff.com, July 2015.
14. Ryan Frantz, op. cit.
15. An Application Program Interface (API) is a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications. Basically, an API specifies how software components should interact.
16. "The Tech That Brings You Your Food," bytes.swiggy.com, May 2017.
17. "A Start-Up by IIM, IIT Grads to Quickly Deliver Food from Restaurants!," www.rediff.com, July 2015.
18. "The Tech That Brings You Your Food," bytes.swiggy.com, May 2017.
19. "Kabootar - Swiggy's Communication Platform," bytes.swiggy.com, May 2017.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. The Goods and Services Tax (GST) is an indirect tax which has replaced many indirect taxes in India. GST was passed in the Parliament on March 29, 2017. The Act came into effect on July 1, 2017.
23. A cloud kitchen is basically a takeaway outlet that provides no dine-in facility. They function as a production unit with a space for the preparation of food. The food can be ordered online, hence, the name cloud kitchen.
24. Roopana, "What Everyone Ought to Know About Swiggy Pop," trioangle.com, March 2019.
25. Devansh Gupta, "The Swiggy Delivery Challenge (Part One)," bytes.swiggy.com, May 2018.
26. "The Swiggy Delivery Challenge (Part Two)," bytes.swiggy.com, May 2019.
27. Ibid.
28. "The Swiggy Delivery Challenge (Part Two)," bytes.swiggy.com, May 2019.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Supraja Srinivasan, "Swiggy Launches 'Swiggy Packaging Assist' Marketplace Program for Restaurant Partners," economictimes.indiatimes.com, September 2018.
32. Ibid.
33. Anirban Sen, "Swiggy Revenue Trebles, But Loss Doubles Too in 2017-18," www.livemint.com, October 2018.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Anirban Sen, op. cit.
37. Aditi Srivastava, "Swiggy, Zomato in Top Gear as Ride-Hailing Companies Slow Down," economictimes. indiatimes.com, May 2019.
38. Sindhu Jashyap, "Swiggy vs Zomato: Foodtech in the Spotlight Again; it's Time for the Battle of the Biggies," yourstory.com, February 2018.
39. Akansha Ahuja and Anirban Sen, "Swiggy, Zomato Hike Delivery Boy Salaries as Competition Grows," www.livemint.com, July 2018.
40. "Swiggy Launches 'Daily' App for Homestyle Meals," economictimes.indiatimes.com, June 2019.
41. Ibid.
42. Sindhu Jashyap, op. cit.
43. Thimmaya Poojary, "Swiggy's Tech Head on How the Foodtech Startup is Using AI to Go Beyond Food Deliveries," yourstory.com, July 2019.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. Shrija Agarwal and Anirban Sen, "Swiggy in Talks to Raise $700 Million for New Business," www.livemint.com, September 2018.