Sriharsha Majety & Nandan Reddy on IPO Strategy

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.

Swiggy launched its IPO in November 2024 at ₹390 per share, valuing the company at $11.3 billion — a relative discount to its 2022 private mark given the intervening two years, and a public-market test of the founders' hyperlocal and quick-commerce thesis.

Ahead of the November 2024 IPO, founders Sriharsha Majety and Nandan Reddy sold shares worth roughly Rs 300 crore ($36 million) since April 2024 — Majety about Rs 190–195 crore and Reddy about Rs 100 crore — at Rs 340–345 per share, with a person briefed on the matter describing the sale as covering ESOP-related tax liabilities rather than as a distress signal.

In the IPO's offer-for-sale, Majety and Reddy each offloaded 1.75 million shares worth approximately Rs 130 crore at the recent share-sale price, while third co-founder Rahul Jaimini — who had already left the company in 2020 to co-found edtech Pesto — sold 1.1 million shares worth about Rs 44 crore.

The Arc frames Swiggy as a 'professionally managed company' rather than a 'promoter-run company' since the founder shareholding sits below 10%, a status that makes the founders themselves eligible for ESOPs — placing Swiggy alongside Zomato, Delhivery, PB Fintech and FirstCry in the Indian listed-unicorn taxonomy where control is institutionally distributed rather than concentrated.

The piece draws the parallel with FirstCry's Supam Maheshwari selling about Rs 300 crore before listing, and Zomato's Deepinder Goyal selling a 0.63% stake for about $32 million before the 2021 IPO — situating Swiggy's pre-IPO founder sale inside a clear pattern among Indian listed unicorns rather than treating it as anomalous.

Swiggy filed its initial prospectus for a $1.25 billion IPO targeting a valuation of $12–15 billion, against a $10.7 billion private valuation at its February 2022 fundraise — a listing range that implied almost flat valuation over nearly three years despite material expansion of operations.