Swiggy sets up development centre in Gurugram, home turf of rival Zomato

The centre in Gurugram will focus on building platforms and applications that will improve the overall experience of Swiggy's more than 150,000 restaurant partners across 500 cities and towns in India.

Swiggy is rapidly scaling up its technology (tech) teams as the food delivery giant is witnessing strong recovery and growth over the past few months.

The SoftBank-backed company is hiring across engineering, product, design, analytics, and data science functions in the next two quarters.

Building this team, Swiggy is setting up a new development centre in Gurugram.

Its rival Zomato, which had a stellar debut on the Indian stock exchanges in July, is also headquartered in Gurugram.

With the present development teams based in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, Swiggy chose Gurugram as the next centre after a poll among the engineering community.

The centre in Gurugram will focus on building platforms and applications that will improve the overall experience of Swiggy’s 150,000-plus restaurant partners across 500 cities and towns in India.

“At Swiggy, we are committed to creating better, delightful experiences, not only for our customers, but also for our vendors and restaurant partners,” said Dale Vaz, chief technology officer, Swiggy.

“The Gurugram development centre will augment our ‘restaurant tech platform capabilities’, allow us to experiment with new service offerings, and help us deliver a superior experience to our partners.

"We are excited to bring on the brightest engineers into our tech team,” added Vaz.

The centre will begin operations with a small team of highly skilled engineers. It will be led by Ashish Arora, vice-president-engineering, and scale over time.

Arora said Gurugram has emerged as a big start-up hub with great talent available from the industry, as well as from top engineering colleges in the region.

“Taking advantage of the talent pool, the team at our Gurugram development centre will comprise a mix of industry hires across levels, as well as some of our current Swiggy engineers who wish to work from the Gurugram office,” said Arora.

In July, Swiggy closed a $1.25-billion fund-raise, marking the first investment in the category by SoftBank Vision Fund 2.

This took the valuation of the Bengaluru-based start-up by more than 50 per cent to $5.5 billion, from $3.6 billion earlier, according to industry sources.

This fund-raise is expected to give enough firepower to Swiggy to counter competition from rivals Zomato, Amazon, Dunzo, and Ola Foods, among others.

Food services is a $65-billion market opportunity in India, according to research firm RedSeer, growing at 9 per cent per annum and likely to reach $110 billion by 2025.

Within the food services market of $65 billion, online delivery forms only a small subset at a market size of $4.2 billion (6-7 per cent).

Photograph: PTI Photo