Sriharsha Majety & Nandan Reddy on Diversification

The business model Majety built has multiple complementary streams: commission from restaurant partners, delivery and platform fees, the Swiggy One subscription for repeat usage, and quick-commerce via Instamart — a layered approach that hedges against dependence on any one revenue line.

By 2026, the founders had broadened Swiggy into a multi-vertical platform spanning food delivery, Instamart for quick commerce, Dineout for restaurant discovery, Scenes for events and ticketing, and the now-discontinued Swiggy Genie for package delivery — a portfolio that illustrates the urban-convenience thesis the HBS case identified.

Swiggy moved from 16 Indian cities in mid-2018 to 500 cities in 2019, matching rival Zomato's scale, and in early 2019 extended into general product delivery with Swiggy Stores and a package service called Swiggy Go, later rebranded as Swiggy Genie in April 2020.

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.

In 2022 Swiggy acquired the dining and table-reservation platform Dineout from Times Internet in an all-stock deal valued at $120 million, and in 2023 sold its Swiggy Access kitchen network to Kitchens@ in a share-swap — a portfolio rebalancing that moved the firm out of asset-heavy kitchens and into consumer-facing discovery.

Instamart, launched in 2020, is presented as the next-stage growth driver: it reached the same GMV in 17 months that the food-delivery platform took 40 months to achieve — a comparison that suggests the logistics and customer-acquisition infrastructure built for food was directly leveraged to compress the ramp for quick commerce.

By the time of the case, Swiggy's Instamart had crossed more than 500 brands and 5,000 products; the strategic priority was increasing cross-pollination between the food-delivery user base and Instamart — a single-customer, multi-vertical thesis that mirrors how large consumer platforms globally compound engagement.