Swiggy: Pandemic Layoffs, Business Model, and Current Status

Category: restaurants, food, and local commerce
Pandemic-layoff role: Additional sourced company
Last updated: 2026-09-26

Founders, executives and investors

The company was incorporated in Hyderabad on December 26, 2013 as Bundl Technologies Private Limited and later became Swiggy Limited. Its IPO prospectus names Sriharsha Majety and Lakshmi Nandan Reddy Obul as its founders; Majety is managing director and group chief executive, and Reddy is a whole-time director. Rahul Jaimini, who sat on the board in 2020, sold shares in the offering alongside them.

The largest seller in the IPO was MIH India Food Holdings B.V., part of Prosus, which sold 109,096,540 shares for ₹42,547.65 million at a weighted average cost of ₹131.15 a share. Accel India IV sold 10,572,706 shares; its weighted average cost was ₹11.17, so each share it sold at ₹390 fetched about 35 times what it had paid.

Business before the pandemic

Swiggy takes orders from customers in its app, passes them to restaurants and sends a delivery partner to collect and deliver the food. Delivery partners are paid per order: an average of ₹59.23 an order in the year to March 2022 and ₹56.01 two years later, when an average of 392,589 of them made deliveries each month. Swiggy added grocery delivery with Instamart in 2020.

During the pandemic

On May 18, 2020, chief executive Sriharsha Majety emailed Swiggy's staff that the company would "part ways with 1100 of our employees spanning across grades and functions." He wrote that work on an "accelerated path to profitability for the food delivery business" had begun "last December," and that Swiggy was "very fortunate to have raised capital just before Covid hit and have sufficient runway today." Of the side businesses being scaled down or shut, the email said the biggest impact was on cloud kitchens, whose facilities were being scaled down "temporarily or permanently." The email did not give a total headcount. It promised departing staff at least three months' salary and up to eight depending on tenure. It waived the one-year stock-option cliff for those who had not reached it and provided medical insurance for them and their families until December 31, 2020.

India went into a 21-day national lockdown on March 24, 2020. Five days earlier Swiggy had introduced no-contact delivery, which customers could choose at checkout on prepaid orders. On March 31 it set up the Swiggy Hunger Savior Covid Relief Fund for delivery partners, with "primary contributions being made by Swiggy's founders, senior leaders, employees and investors." The announcement said Majety had committed half his annual salary and that the company had "also committed all its revenues from 22nd March – the day of the Janata Curfew – towards this purpose." It said it had raised ₹4 crore toward a target of ₹10 crore. The fund was to pay for income protection insurance covering up to 14 days' income for partners who tested positive, food and grocery packages, and COVID-19 hospital costs for partners' families not otherwise insured. The same post said customers could now tip delivery partners in the app.

A post on April 12 said partners with Covid-19 who lost pay during a 14-day quarantine and recovery would receive ₹1,000 a day, and asked the public to give: "For as little as Rs.3500, you could support a delivery partner and his family for a whole week." A separate appeal, Hope, Not Hunger, launched March 30 and run with GiveIndia and Milaap, paid for meals that partner kitchens cooked for state relief camps. Swiggy said it worked with more than 75 NGOs and several state governments, and that the initiative would also "help keep the lights on in restaurants that would otherwise be forced to shut down." After seven weeks it listed ₹9,50,14,827 raised (about ₹9.5 crore), 35,512 individual contributions and 30 lakh (3 million) meals distributed in 30 cities.

For restaurants, Swiggy said on April 16 that it was increasing the frequency of payouts "to enable better cash flows." Its 2020-21 directors' report says a "Jumpstart" program launched in June 2020 "aided over 50,000 restaurant partners in recovery and growth." In May 2021 Swiggy Genie offered discounted deliveries to sellers it selected who provided "essential items like food, medicine, and groceries," up to a cap on orders that "changes from user to user."

The audited consolidated accounts for the year to March 2021 record a change in how delivery was booked. From August 2020, they say, Swiggy was "merely a technology platform provider" for delivery partners, so the delivery fee customers paid them was no longer recognized as Swiggy's income. Delivery income fell from ₹4,680 million to ₹1,173 million and delivery cost from ₹26,738 million to ₹2,838 million, while outsourcing support cost rose from ₹1,813 million to ₹7,472 million. Advertising and marketing fell from ₹18,212 million to ₹4,610 million, and salaries, wages and bonus from ₹9,620 million to ₹8,304 million. Swiggy recorded a ₹1,481 million impairment on equipment and fittings at kitchens that were no longer operating, after management "decided to dis-continue certain kitchens."

The same annual report's directors' report said Swiggy had carried on business "uninterruptedly" through the lockdown and had grown 1.2 times from its March 2020 level and 2.2 times from June 2020. Swiggy said that in 2021 it added Swiggy Suraksha, which included loss-of-pay support for up to 14 days after a positive test, and that it compensated partners for pay lost while getting vaccinated. It reported more than 1.3 lakh (130,000) partners vaccinated. By November 2021 it said it had more than 250,000 delivery partners.

After the first shock

In a September 28, 2021 email to its team, Swiggy said food delivery was "comfortably surpassing our pre-covid peak" and that Supr Daily, its grocery-delivery unit, delivered about 200,000 orders a day across six cities. Revenue from operations reached ₹57,049 million in the year to March 2022, according to the audited consolidated statements. Losses grew again after the lockdown year. Swiggy's restated net loss was ₹36,288.96 million in the year to March 2022, ₹41,793.05 million in the year to March 2023 and ₹23,502.43 million in the year to March 2024, according to the prospectus. The 2022 loss includes ₹1,732.04 million of exceptional charges, all tied in the prospectus's restated notes to Supr Daily. Swiggy impaired in full the goodwill and other intangible assets from buying it and wrote down its equipment and inventory, under a plan to suspend operations in five of its six cities from May 2022.

The 2024 listing

The IPO ran from November 6 to November 8, 2024 in a price band of ₹371 to ₹390. It combined ₹44,990 million of new shares with ₹68,284.27 million sold by existing shareholders, and the shares were listed on the National Stock Exchange of India and BSE on November 13, 2024.

Swiggy Profile: Pandemic Layoffs, Business Model, and Current Status

Founders, executives and investors

Business before the pandemic

During the pandemic

After the first shock

The 2024 listing

Sources