Quick Food Delivery Startup Swish Raises $38 Mn For Multi-City Expansion

Quick food delivery startup Swish has raised $38 Mn (about ₹356 Cr) in its Series B round led by Hara Global and Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from Alteria Capital, Stride Ventures and existing backer Accel. 

The platform plans to use the funds to scale its 10-minute food delivery offering across urban cities, along with investing in team expansion, kitchen automation and supply chain infrastructure. 

Founded in 2024 by Aniket Shah, Ujjwal Sukheja, and Saran S, Swish delivers fresh food in under 10 minutes. The startup’s model hinges on owning or operating the delivery process end-to-end, including the kitchens, ordering platform and delivery fleet – removing the need for third-party commissions. It targets urban clusters with high population density to set up its cloud kitchens that cater to customers within a 1 km radius, allowing for faster delivery. 

Swish claims to receive 20,000 orders per day, with offerings including breakfast items, healthy bowls, desserts and protein-rich meals. 

“Owning every part of the decision in the food supply chain is the only way to serve high-quality, fresh food in 10 minutes to consumers at scale. With the new round of funding, we are poised to accelerate our expansion in a lot more neighbourhoods across cities,” Swish cofounder and CEO Shah said. 

Started in Bengaluru with a modest cloud kitchen, Swish has now raised $58 Mn across three funding rounds. It last raised $14 Mn from Accel, Hara Global, and Unacademy founder Gaurav Munjal in March last year. It currently operates cloud kitchens only in Bengaluru, with plans to expand to multiple cities in the coming period. 

The instant delivery market is seeing intense competition, with startups fighting to deliver everything under the sun in 10 minutes. Quick commerce platforms like Blinkit, Zepto and Instamart, pioneers of the segment in India, have established their position in the daily lives of urban consumers, while instant home services have also gained popularity over the past year or so owing to rapid expansion of startups like Pronto, Snabbit and Urban Company’s ‘Insta Help’. 

However, quick food delivery has been harder to crack. Swiggy, last month, sunsetted its 15-minute food delivery platform Snacc just over a year after its launch as a standalone app due to unviable unit economics that made it hard to achieve significant scale. 

In October last year, Zing also abandoned its plans to scale quick food delivery, despite being a first-mover in the space, pivoting to quick commerce delivery rather than perishable food items. 

Eternal’s Blinkit operates a separate app ‘Bistro’ to deliver food in 15-minutes, while Zepto has rolled out ‘Zepto Cafe’ in select cities, which was scaled down last year. Cloud kitchen unicorn Rebel Foods also launched a separate platform ‘Quickies’ last year to offer 15-minute deliveries. 

These platforms are yet to reveal performance metrics for these verticals as doubts remain about the potential for scaling due to quick food delivery inherently being a capital intensive operation with weak unit economics.

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