Swiggy appoints P&G exec Vivek Sunder as first COO

Online food delivery startup Swiggy has appointed Vivek Sunder, formerly with FMCG major Procter & Gamble, as its first ever chief operating officer, a company statement said.

As COO, Sunder will develop and execute Swiggy’s strategy to drive organisational growth, the statement added.

Sunder joins Swiggy after a long stint of about 20 years at FMCG major P&G. In his most recent role, he was the managing director of P&G, East Africa.

Swiggy, which has over 35,000 restaurant partners spread across 15 cities, recently raised $210 million (around Rs 1,400 crore) in a Series G investment round led by South African technology conglomerate Naspers and Yuri Milner-led DST Global. Existing investor Meituan-Dianping, a Chinese e-commerce service platform also put in money, while US-based hedge fund Coatue Management came on as a new backer.

The deal valued Swiggy at $1.3 billion, making the firm a unicorn, an industry term referring to startups with a valuation of $1 billion or more.

With the Series G round, the company’s total external funding stood at $465 million.

Owned and operated by Bengaluru-based Bundl Technologies Pvt. Ltd, the latest investment came just three months after Swiggy raised $100 million in a Series F round also led by Naspers with participation from existing shareholder Meituan-Dianping.

Swiggy was founded in August 2014 by Sriharsha Majety, Nandan Reddy and Rahul Jaimini. Majety and Reddy are BITS-Pilani alumni, while Jaimini is an Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur alumnus.

In September last year, Swiggy appointed former Britannia Industries executive Rahul Bothra as its first chief financial officer.

Apart from Zomato, Swiggy competes with FreshMenu and Foodpanda, which was acquired by homegrown cab-hailing major Ola late last year.

For the financial year 2016-17, Swiggy clocked in revenues of Rs 133 crore, up from Rs 20 crore in the previous year, as per its filings with the Registrar of Companies (RoC).

Net loss, however, widened to Rs 205 crore in 2016-17 from Rs 137 crore in the year prior. Total expenditure too surged to Rs 345 crore from Rs 157 crore in the previous year.

The company is yet to file its financial statement for 2017-18.