loading
loading
In August 2024, Inc42 asked whether Swish could pull off what Zomato couldn't. Two years on, the question has turned on its head. Zomato has quit. So have Swiggy, Rebel Foods and Zing. Swish is still here. And it just raised $24 Mn this past week, less than six months after it had raised $38 Mn. As we said above, several startups and listed companies that entered the segment over the past two years have either scaled back or shut their offerings. Zepto Cafe has reduced its footprint, Eternal’s Zomato shut Quick and Everyday, Swiggy closed Snacc earlier this year, Zing shut operations, and Rebel Foods has halted QuickiES. Less than two years into its operations, at a time when quick food delivery was on everyone’s minds, Swish is now the lone ranger in the space. The latest round comes at an interesting point for India's 10 minute food delivery market. The Bengaluru-based startup now serves more than 1 Mn orders a month, with monthly orders tripling since March 2026. It operates in 50 pincodes across Bengaluru and Delhi NCR. The question now is whether Swish has found a model that can work where several better funded companies have struggled. Swish Is Scaling Up, But There’s A Long Way To Go Founded in late 2024 by Aniket Shah, Ujjwal Sukheja and Saran S, Swish has a different model from the traditional food delivery model, which was popularised by Swiggy and Zomato, and which even Rapido has carried forward. Unlike the other platforms which are aggregators, Swish owns the kitchens, prepares the food, operates the technology and manages delivery. Its kitchens are placed close to customers, generally within a 1 Km radius, allowing the startup to control the time between ordering and delivery. That has allowed Swish to build a relatively small but dense network. The startup said in its latest funding announcement that it has crossed 1 Mn monthly orders at its peak, and that more than 80% of orders are delivered within 15 minutes. Its kitchens have an average preparation time of under four minutes. The menu has also moved well beyond the snack heavy proposition with which the category started. Swish began with around 75 SKUs and has since expanded it by 3X, spanning meals, snacks and beverages. Lunch and dinner now account for more orders than snacks and late night consumption. That matters because the larger opportunity for Swish is likely to be everyday meals rather than occasional impulse purchases. When Swish launched in Delhi, cofounder Shah revealed that more than four in 10 of its customers have ordered again, offering an indication of customer repeat behavior in Delhi. There is also a gap between where Swish is today and where it once planned to be. In late 2024, Shah had mentioned plans to have 150 kitchens across Bengaluru by March 2025. It currently has around 55 kitchens, even after entering Delhi NCR. The latest fundraise gives Swish more room to build more momentum in that regard. Swish wants to expand its kitchen network in Bengaluru and Delhi NCR and has an ambitious target of having more than 1,000 kitchens over the next five years. For context, Rebel Foods, one of the largest cloud kitchen companies from India, claims to run 450 cloud kitchens for 4,000 restaurants cumulatively across 75 cities in three countries. And it raised more than $785 Mn to get there over the course of 15 years. Scaling up physical kitchens requires several hundreds of millions of dollars, and if Swish has to get to that ambitious target, it has to continue raising large rounds, particularly because quick food needs higher cloud kitchen density than what Rebel Foods had in mind. Quick Food Players Exit Stage Swish's biggest advantage today may be that it is still in the game. The list of companies that have exited quick food delivery is almost as long as the list of players that entered this space. Zepto Cafe, which pioneered this concept, has been scaling down. As Inc42 reported, more than 50 Zepto Cafe kitchens were shut in 2025, with order volume falling from a peak of around 1 Lakh orders a day to nearly half that level. The problems were not limited to demand. Zepto also faced supply-chain constraints and a shortage of trained kitchen staff, leading it to pause operations across several cities. Eternal took a different route. It shut Zomato Quick along with Everyday in May 2025 just months after entering the space. Back then, Zomato cited weak demand and profitability concerns. Swiggy pulled the plug on Snacc in February 2026, with the company saying that product-market fit was not the problem, but unit economics was. Gurugram-based Zing, which shut shop last year after starting out around the same time as Swish, told Inc42 that the startup had overestimated demand, with customers preferring food from their favourite restaurants even if it took longer to arrive. More recently, Rebel Foods also halted its QuickiES vertical earlier this year, which had offered 15-minute delivery. Blinkit-owned Bistro remains one of the few dedicated players still operating in the category. Its model, like Swish, involves company controlled kitchens and fast delivery. It must be noted that Bistro is separate from Zomato’s past efforts Then there are Swiggy Bolt and Toing, which need to be examined differently from Swish. Neither requires Swiggy to build and operate its own kitchens. Instead, Swiggy works with restaurants that can prepare or pack selected items quickly, with deliveries generally limited to a 2 Km radius. By May 2025, Bolt was live across more than 500 cities and accounted for more than one in 10 Swiggy food orders. Swish and Bistro own the complete stack, so also carry more of the cost and risk. But while Bistro has Blinkit’s core business to rely on for less costly customer acquisition and can lean on the brand, Swish has no such fallback. So how does Swish fare with regard to unit economics? What Quick Food Unit Economics Look Like This is primarily where the startup's latest funding round becomes more interesting. As per a report in The Arc, Swish's food gross margin is around 60%-70% on an average order value of ₹250. This would translate to roughly ₹160 of gross profit per order before kitchen, delivery and corporate costs. At that level, the company needs every kitchen to generate enough orders to cover food preparation, rent, staff, delivery and corporate costs. The report added that close to 10% of Swish users order twice a day with customers placing just over three orders per month on average. However, compared to a conventional food marketplace, Swish’s model has the ability to retain a higher share of the order value. For instance, Zomato or Swiggy face pushback from restaurants when they raise commissions and have to maintain a fine balance. Swish instead has to look at managing costs to improve its net margin per order rather than focus on commissions. For this to work, the kitchen has to stay busy. Swish is currently doing around 30,000 orders a day across 55 kitchens and a few of its mature kitchens can have around 800 orders a day. On average, each kitchen caters to 800 orders per day. Growing this density will be key to Swish’s growth. It is also the part of the model that investors are betting on. This scale has to eventually translate into profits, but Swish has a longer rope than listed companies when it comes to profitability. At the moment the focus is on growing order volume, gross order value and growing the user base, and the aim is that this along with the cloud kitchen density will be able to deliver profits in a few quarters. The company plans to add advertising within the app as a revenue layer in the near future. A kitchen doing 800 orders a day is more profitable than one doing 100. Delivery riders can be stationed closer to the kitchen, staff costs can be spread across more orders and food waste can be monitored more closely. The problem is whether these numbers hold as Swish moves beyond its strongest Bengaluru neighbourhoods. Which means, the startup has to spend extra money on brand awareness when it enters new markets accompanied by heavy discounting. Swish has already raised $78 Mn across four rounds. For a startup that has been operational for less than two years, investor backing is lifeblood, but soon that reliance will need to be curbed. The next phase will be less about raising money and more about proving that when its cloud kitchen network grows, Swish doesn’t have a unit economics mess on its hands. Now, the startup has something most of its quick food rivals did not get: more time at the table. The harder question is whether that time will be enough to prove that quick food delivery can become a large food business, rather than another quick commerce experiment that works only in a handful of dense neighbourhoods. Edited By Nikhil Subramaniam Creatives: Abhyam Gusai
document fetched 2026-09-14 02:48 · canonical https://inc42.com/features/swish-buys-itself-more-time-at-the-quick-food-table