Food delivery platform Swiggy on Tuesday said it has closed a fundraise of $1.25 billion (Rs 9,344 crore) led by new investor SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and existing backer Prosus Ventures.
Swiggy's fundraise comes after its rival Zomato's closely watched initial public offering (IPO) received a thumping response from investors last week.
Swiggy said in a statement that other new investors who contributed to this funding round were Qatar Investment Authority, Falcon Edge Capital, Amansa Capital, Goldman Sachs, Think Investments and Carmignac.
Existing investors Accel and Wellington Management also pooled in capital.
The company noted that the fundraise was heavily oversubscribed following strong interest from investors.
Part of this total funding amount was already raised earlier this year in April.
The latest funding will boost its core food delivery business and help build its new food and non-food adjacencies. To achieve this, the startup will invest in technology and artificial intelligence and hire across teams.
Sriharsha Majety, CEO, Swiggy, said that the biggest investments will in our non-food businesses that grew tremendously in the past 15 months during the pandemic.
Sumer Juneja, partner, SoftBank Investment Advisers, said that Swiggy has the railroads in place to empower multiple businesses to reach the new age consumer on a daily basis, and food delivery is just the beginning.
SoftBank Vision Fund 2, backed by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group Corp, has been active in its investments in India this year.
Its recent bets in India include enterprise software platform Whatfix, social ecommerce platform Meesho, small and medium enterprise (SME) financing platform OfBusiness, and banking tech startup Zeta.
Swiggy, run by Bengaluru-based Bundl Technologies Pvt. Ltd, was founded in August 2014 by Majety, Nandan Reddy and Rahul Jaimini.
Prior to this funding, Swiggy raised Rs 805 crore (about $112.6 million) in a round of funding led by Prosus, the international digital assets arm of South African conglomerate.
Swiggy previously raised $1 billion at a valuation of $3.3 billion in December 2018.
It competes with Zomato, which became the first unicorn to float an IPO in India.
In 2020, Zomato agreed to acquire ride-hailing company Uber Technologies Inc.'s food delivery business in India -- Uber Eats -- in an all-stock transaction.
The deal gave Uber a 9.99% stake in Zomato.
This acquisition of Uber Eats marked a big consolidation in the highly competitive and heavily funded food delivery market in India, heralding a two-way race between Zomato and Swiggy.
