Sriharsha Majety & Nandan Reddy on Crisis Management

Bundl Technologies, the courier and shipping service he started with Nandan Reddy in 2013, failed because customers were hard to find and the team lacked the technical depth to scale a logistics platform — a failure that forced the founders to admit they needed a technology co-founder before they could compete in a software-driven market.

The founders built their own delivery fleet rather than relying on restaurant staff, an operational choice that distinguished Swiggy from Foodpanda, TinyOwl and Ola Cafe — all of which were better-funded but struggled to control the last mile, eventually consolidating or shutting down by 2015–16.

Majety is reported to use premortems — pre-decision exercises that imagine what could go wrong before committing — as a risk-management tool, particularly when expanding into new verticals, navigating the IPO, or scaling Instamart amid competition from Blinkit and Zepto.

Majety and Reddy originally designed an e-commerce site called Bundl in 2013 to facilitate courier service and shipping within India; Bundl was halted in 2014 and rebranded to enter food delivery, with the duo bringing in Rahul Jaimini — formerly of Myntra — and formally launching Swiggy in August 2014.

By 2015, Swiggy expanded from Bengaluru to eight Tier-1 cities, a moment when competitors like Foodpanda (later acquired by Ola), TinyOwl (later acquired by Zomato) and Ola Cafe (closed) were struggling — the founders entered a fragile market and outlasted rivals who had more capital but weaker operational focus.

During the COVID-19 pandemic the company laid off 1,100 employees and shut down over three-fourths of its cloud kitchens, while also initiating doorstep alcohol delivery in Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha — a moment of simultaneous contraction and category-stretch that tested the founders' crisis management.

In August 2020, Swiggy launched Instamart, an instant-grocery service built on a network of dark stores; by early 2021 the company had closed Swiggy Stores and consolidated its non-food operations under the Instamart brand — a clean strategic decision to kill a struggling vertical and double down on quick commerce.

Ahead of the IPO, Swiggy laid off 400 employees or about 6% of its workforce in January 2024, then converted to a public limited company in April 2024 and confidentially filed for an IPO — a sequence that bundled cost discipline with listing preparation, a pattern now standard among Indian consumer-tech listings.

The case identifies the central strategic tension going forward: ensure user stickiness in an increasingly competitive food-delivery market while fueling growth through Instamart — a dual challenge that framed the firm's IPO thesis and its subsequent resource allocation choices.