WHY MAJETY MARCHES TO A DIFFERENT BEAT

Swiggy, which will list on Wednesday, needs its idea-driven founder to steer it towards profitability

- Ranjani Raghavan

When Swiggy Ltd lists on the stock exchanges on Wednesday, it will mark the culmination of a short journey for Sriharsha Majety, the company's co-founder. Majety, who began his startup journey a little over a decade ago by launching a logistics platform, quickly grew bored and shut that business. But having learnt some lessons along the way, he decided to focus on building a tech platform for hyperlocal delivery, launching Swiggy. From there till the upcoming listing, it's been a roller coaster ride with many ups and downs.

Today, Swiggy uses technology to offer several services, including food delivery, quick commerce (Instamart), out-of-home restaurant reservations (Dineout), event bookings (SteppinOut), and product pick-up or drop-off services (Genie). But it was not easy convincing Swiggy's investors to get on board. Outside observers were also sceptical.

For instance, in 2014, when Swiggy launched as a food-delivery platform, many in the industry had reservations, because the startup planned to have its own fleet. At the time, most other food-tech startups were online ordering platforms and used other service providers for delivery.

Indeed, Deepinder Goyal, founder of Swiggy rival Zomato, wrote in a blog post in June 2016 that managing an in-house delivery fleet was not cost-effective (Zomato used Delhivery and Grab for its deliveries). "If we were to do this ourselves (and we've had the urge to do it multiple times), we would end up ruining the unit economics for the entire company in one shot," Goyal wrote. "You will lose more money than you can ever imagine recovering in any way possible," he concluded in the post, which was later deleted, but not before tech-focused information site MediaNama had captured it.