For a large consumer tech company like Swiggy, hot on the heels of a $1.3 Bn IPO, 2025 was a year of all-out push to its quick commerce vehicle with bets on new products.
In India’s hyper-competitive quick commerce market, Swiggy Instamart aced with innovations and new features to edge out its fiercest rival Zepto, while Eternal-run Blinkit ruled the market with nearly half of it in its command.
“Swiggy’s business strategy has been about being nimble and humble,” Swiggy CEO Sriharsha Majety said in a letter to shareholders on the Q2 FY26 financials. “It strove to become more and more relevant to customers by understanding their needs and reinventing itself to cater to more of their purchase missions; rather than trying to shape their behaviour artificially to suit its offerings.”
As the consumer tech zone turned more bustling, the company stepped up focus on retaining users, widening the acquisition funnel through different apps or varied features within the mother app and defending the leverage, especially towards the latter half of the year.
While all these lifted the topline 35% to INR 15,226.8 Cr in FY25 from INR 11,247.4 Cr a year back, the core food delivery business seemed to have stabilised despite the sectoral headwinds. Quick commerce, although still staggering over mounting losses, was equivalent to two-thirds of the food delivery business. A year after it went public, the company saw its net loss deepen 33% to INR 3,116.8 Cr in FY25 from INR 2,350.2 Cr in the previous fiscal on the back of quick commerce expansion.
As the year comes to a close, Swiggy’s 2025 business strategy makes an intriguing case for a review.
The theme of Swiggy’s 2025 financial story is the capital strategy, while quick commerce runs as the axis of its playbook, although the segment has turned out to be a cash-guzzler.
While Blinkit maintains the lead with a 40-45% market share, Instamart finds its steepest competition from Zepto, with their claims of 25-27% each. This trio controls about 90% of the market.
With the quick commerce blazing, the sprinters in the high-stakes 10-minute delivery race get loaded with cash to grab a bigger slice of the market pie.
Eternal, reportedly sitting on INR 18,000 Cr cash reserves, pumped INR 600 Cr into Blinkit on November 26, driving its total capital infusion for 2025 to INR 2,600 Cr. Zepto, on the other hand, has a liquidity support of $900 Mn (INR 7,400 Cr) after it raised $450 Mn in October.
“The external competitive environment is dynamic, and legacy and new players continue to attract investments to the sector. This has called for a conversation with the Board to consider an additional fund-raise that will give us access to sufficient growth capital while enhancing our strategic flexibility,” Majety told shareholders earlier.
Zepto has, meanwhile, geared up for a fresh shot at a $1 Bn listing in 2026, stoking up the cash wars.
The qualified placement is likely to take Swiggy’s capital reserves close to that of Eternal’s. Industry analysts see Swiggy’s QIP plan as both defensive as well as expansionary. Defensive, because quick commerce remains one of the most capital-intensive business models in the ecosystem, and expansionary because Swiggy appears determined to sustain and widen its lead in high-AOV cohorts, rather than relying on discount-led growth.
Quick commerce was the undisputed centrepiece of Swiggy’s 2025 blueprint. Insiders describe the company’s approach as a strategy to chase market share with operating guardrails designed to protect its unit economics. Although expansion in quick commerce caused major cash burn for most part of the year, the company tightened its fiscal control towards the latter half of 2025.
In Q2 FY26, Swiggy’s losses stood at INR 1,092 Cr, soaring 54% on-year. The losses, however, shrank 9% sequentially.
A year back, CFO Rahul Bothra told Inc42 that the consumer services giant was looking to introduce ‘mega dark stores’ to deliver a wider assortment of products in 10 to 20 minutes. This was a year of building up on this thesis of mega dark stores or megapods with cautious expansion towards the latter half of the year.
Majety earlier said that while the overall dark store strength for Swiggy was increased to 1,102 by September, only 40 were added to the network in Q2 FY26, with half of those being megapods.
Megapods were a notable internal shift. These are large-format dark store facilities, measuring 8,000-10,000 Sq Ft each and capable of stocking up to 40,000 SKUs. The rationale was gaining operational efficiency by increasing assortment without proportionately raising supply chain complexities or last-mile costs.
The second lever for Instamart in Swiggy’s books was the ‘max saver feature’ it launched reportedly to increase the AOV and drive customer retention by giving bigger discounts on larger basket sizes.
The Swiggy leadership, sources said, is committed to protecting this AOV edge. “Led by our thrust to increase the sale of non-grocery and general merchandise on our platform, contribution of non-grocery categories in our GOV mix has increased further to 26.2% from 8.7% a year back. This was led by a significant rise in consumption in categories like electronics (audio, wearables, and so on), small home appliances, home and kitchen and toys, which have cumulatively doubled in our mix over the past two quarters,” Majety said.
In January, Swiggy made a bold move to launch a separate app for Instamart, while retaining Instamart’s presence in the main food delivery app. This happened at the cusp of an aggressive growth that the quick commerce industry saw over the last couple of years.
There has been an exponential growth in the number of dedicated quick commerce users and would rather prefer a standalone interface for grocery needs, than an all-encompassing app. The company sees this dual-entry strategy as a user-funnel multiplier, rather than redundancy.
Swiggy did not hold back when it came to app launches throughout the year. The Bengaluru-headquartered firm rolled out multiple apps, including the standalone Instamart app.
In late December 2024, the company launched Scenes, which marked its foray into the live events vertical and was integrated within the main app.
The year kick-started with Swiggy rolling out concierge services app Crew for its premium consumer base starting at a quarterly subscription of INR 999 and was first piloted across a few metros.
The company went on to launch Pyng as a services marketplace in April to connect users with professional services in health, wellness, financial advisory, astrology, and so on. Swiggy eventually called off Pyng in October.
The company also launched its 15-minute snack delivery app, Snacc, in addition to fast food delivery feature Bolt, launched within the main app. Snacc featured home-style, unbranded food options which deliver snack-based foods from Swiggy’s own dark stores (centralised location). Embedded feature Bolt, launched in October 2024, offers restaurant deliveries and focuses on eateries within 2 km radius and has since expanded to 700 cities, contributing to 10% of the overall orders.
The listed foodtech giant also introduced Toing, a budget food ordering app in September, focussed on providing budget meals between INR 100 and INR 150. The company, as per the sources, plans to expand Toing to several pockets in cities where there is a higher concentration of student-living facilities and demand for price-sensitive food options.
Swiggy, insiders said, wanted to access a wider market through these experiments. People aware of the product and tech team operations and strategy said that unlike in the first few years of its inception, Swiggy does not fundamentally allocate a lot of resources in terms of workforce or capital expenses towards app development anymore.
While Swiggy is yet to unfurl a super app strategy, its product-led approach of 2025 makes it amply clear that innovation-led bets are going to be a part of the consumer tech firm’s strategy going forward.
This approach possibly mirrors China’s super app Meituan’s business model, which has food delivery services at its core, and has since expanded to grocery delivery, movie ticket booking and other products which include an all-encompassing app and other mini apps.
Swiggy’s food delivery vertical entered 2025 as a stable line of business, but the company continued to layer incremental growth drivers across the year. It is looking at an 18-20% growth in FY26 gross order value, targeting above 5% margin by FY28, according to its earnings report.
According to Swiggy’s earnings reports, Food Delivery GOV for Q4FY25 stood at INR 7,347 Cr, nearly 57% share of the overall GOV at INR 12,888 Cr.
Swiggy’s food delivery growth picked up towards the latter half of FY25, growing 18% on-year and also growing 5.6% on a QoQ basis. Food delivery GOV for Q2FY26 stood at 8,542 Cr, nearly 51% share of the overall GOV at INR 16,683 Cr.
The food delivery sector went into a phase of slowdown since 2023 with a slump in overall discretionary spending, in turn affecting platforms like Swiggy and Zomato. Majety had earlier acknowledged the same that many companies, including Swiggy were indeed impacted by the trend.
Swiggy also continued to roll out several features to overcome the challenge of slowdown in the food delivery segment and test new use cases. These included Protein Store to reach out to health-focussed consumer categories and Deskeats in 7,000 tech parks across 30 cities to cater to the office going population.
Swiggy also launched 99 Stores to offer ultra-low-cost food services and expanded its meals-on-train services in 2025. “With these new propositions in play, we continue to move towards making food delivery as frictionless as possible, and compete with more sources of informal supply, including office canteens, unorganised restaurants, and even the home-kitchen,” the Swiggy CEO had said.
The company, according to Majety, will continue to focus on affordable options to unlock the profitability in the food delivery business, while past experiments have started translating into growth in monthly transacting users.
The sector also saw heated competition with Rapido joining the fray with its Ownly app launched in August 2025 and platform fees being hiked for both Zomato and Swiggy to boost their margins.
“Food delivery has always been a very hotly contested category, with both existing players and new competition striving to create an opening in what is a thin-margin, high-visibility, and operations-intensive business,” he said.
Despite competitive pressures, Swiggy maintained the market presence and reiterated during its Q2 investor commentary that it is targeting double-digit growth in the FY26 volumes.
While the quick commerce and legacy businesses delivered higher revenues for Swiggy in FY25, large-scale cash burn led to deepening of losses that continued beyond the fiscal and weighed on the first two quarters of FY26 as well. The company also succeeded in retaining users even in the face of simmering competition, especially in discounts and pricing bands.
The public markets reacted cautiously, with Swiggy’s shares trading under pressure throughout the year, reflecting investor concerns about profitability timelines, though strong demand for its INR 10,000 Cr QIP helped the shares trade higher for longer in the middle of December.
Swiggy, which was listed at INR 420 in 2024, saw significant volatility across 2025, scaling a 52-week high of INR 617.3 earlier in the year, before correcting sharply due to widening losses and competitive pressures.
Although the shares have declined 24% year-to-date, trading at INR 417.50 on December 12, there are early signs of a potential turnaround. The stock showed a mild recovery in recent weeks, gaining over 8% in the last two weeks and 4% in the past week.
Has the food delivery major left the worst behind in 2025?
In fact, Swiggy exits 2025 with a stronger product ecosystem, a potential $2 Bn capital reserve, and a differentiated quick commerce thesis built around its AOV leverage, rather than discount-driven model. The company is also operating on a higher burn and an increased market scrutiny for profitability milestones and not just scaling topline.
The year 2026 will likely test whether this balance between aggressive expansion and disciplined economics can sustain Swiggy’s momentum in one of India’s most competitive consumer internet sectors.
