Naspers is a South African investment company looking to extend their business to make a name for themselves worldwide. A few days back, Naspers had invested a mind-numbing $540 million in an educational startup, Byju’s. Naspers has made yet another investment in another Indian company called Swiggy. Naspers is investing $1 billion in the famous food delivering company.
Swiggy was founded back in 2014 and in less than four years their success has skyrocketed. Starting with a comparatively lower number of restaurants, now Swiggy claims to work with over 50,000 restaurants in more than 50 cities. But there is no way of knowing the validity of their claim as they have not divulged any data backing up their claim as is the standard with any privately owned company. Tencent, a Chinese investing conglomerate will be backing up the investment along with Hillhouse Capital, Wellington Management Company, DST Global, Meituan Dianping and Coatue Management.
The main reason behind Tencent’s involvement with this investment is Naspers itself. Naspers was one of the oldest and earliest investors in the Chinese internet company and still to this day holds a total of 33 percent of the share in the company. Naspers’ investment in Swiggy will make them one of the very few companies with a billion dollar invested in them and as such Swiggy will be joining the other members of the billion-dollar-round club such as Flipkart and OYO.
After Naspers’ investment into Byju’s, the educational startup overall has had huge success. It goes without saying that Naspers would not be disappointed with their decision to invest in Swiggy, keeping in mind the previous and recent success of Byju’s. There are some competitors of Swiggy in the food delivering business like Zomato, FoodPanda and UberEats but the popularity and success of Swiggy is unprecedented.
