Swiggy has led a $180 million financing spherical into bike taxi startup Rapido because the Indian meals supply big appears to broaden its fleet community throughout the nation, the 2 companies stated on Friday.
Rapido’s Collection D financing spherical additionally noticed participation from TVS Motor Firm and present traders Westbridge, Shell Ventures and Nexus Ventures. The brand new spherical values Rapido at over $800 million.
The six-year-old startup, which additionally counts Kunal Shah of CRED and Amarjit Singh Batra of Spotify India amongst its backers, affords its two-wheeler service in about 100 Indian cities. The startup, which has raised $310 million thus far, says it has amassed over 25 million clients and 1.5 million driver-partners who it calls captains.
At a time when most different fleet startups and companies, together with Ola and Uber have struggled to maker deeper inroads in India (in components due to unfeasible financial mannequin), Rapido’s main give attention to two-wheeler has allowed it to proceed to slowly develop. A lot of different companies together with Swiggy’s chief rival, Zomato, have been trying to again Rapido in current months, an individual accustomed to the matter stated.
“We maintain loads of respect for the resilience Rapido has displayed in reworking the mobility and logistics house in India,” stated Sriharsha Majety, co-founder and chief govt of Swiggy.
“Swiggy and Rapido share a imaginative and prescient to construct a logistics platform that empowers riders by extra alternatives and better earnings. Whereas we’ve already been working collectively, this funding facilitates nearer alignment to leverage the synergies between the platforms and enhance the worth we offer to each shoppers and supply executives/captains throughout the nation,” he added.
Aravind Sanka, co-founder of Rapido, stated the startup will use “studying from Swiggy’s expertise” to scale “all through” the nation and improve its riders’ expertise.
“Apart from, TVS Motor, who’re very obsessed with EVs and the way forward for mobility, will assist us in additional growth. We hope to speed up our tempo of turning into a family identify as we improve our geographies and companies, on the spine of our strong, global-standard expertise,” he added.
The startup hopes to increase to serve 50 million clients within the subsequent one 12 months, he stated.
