Swiggy

The platform aims to use the funds to scale its product and engineering teams and looks to expand to more than 200,000 restaurant locations globally in the next two years. "With this investment, we will continue to widen UrbanPipera's offerings to meet many more digital opportunities in the restaurant ecosystem, along with bolstering our platform capabilities," said Saurabh Gupta, CEO, UrbanPiper.

The Series D round also saw investment from TVS Motor Company, along with existing investors Westbridge, Shell Ventures and Nexus Ventures. "We look forward to learning from Swiggy's experience to scale up throughout the country and enhance our captains/customers' experience, who are the backbone of our business. TVS Motor will help us in further expansion," said Aravind Sanka, Co-founder, Rapido.

According to website outage monitor platform DownDetector, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers went down at the same time on Wednesday afternoon, indicating that it may have caused the brief outage. However, it could not be confirmed. While 55 per cent users reported problems with server connection at AWS, 38 per cent had problems with AWS Console, according to DownDetector.

While the CCI has indeed directed a Director-General (DG) investigation, the order in some sense is a vindication for the food delivery companies since the CCI has not found concerns with issues around "bundling of services, their independence with respect to levy of commissions or the alleged imposition of unilateral clauses on restaurant partners".

Following a complaint from the National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI), the CCI said that it is of the view that there exists a prima facie case with respect to some of the conduct of Zomato and Swiggy, "which requires an investigation by the Director General (DG), to determine whether the conduct of platforms have resulted in contravention of the provisions". The NRAI represents over 50,000 restaurant operators across the country.

Zomato, PolicyBazaar, and Nykaa and several other companies' stocks took a hard beating on Monday amid the market crash as analysts feel these companies have low valuations. Shares of the food delivery aggregator hit the 20 per cent lower circuit intraday and settled at Rs 90.95 on Monday.

Before Swiggy, India has seen four 'decacorns' to date -- Flipkart, Paytm, Byju's and OYO. With this funding, Swiggy also surpassed the valuation of its closest rival Zomato that saw its stock hammered and closing at Rs 90.95 on Monday, shrinking its market cap to below $10 billion. In the last few months, Swiggy has expanded Instamart to 19 cities, as grocery delivery becomes the next big thing in the country.

The company claimed that this is the highest ever for food delivery in India. "This year we exceeded all our plans by a big margin and were overwhelmed by the customer response. OPM reached almost 9,500 level by early dinner itself, which is almost 1.7x of last year's peak," the company said in a statement. "As the evening progressed, we saw a 177 per cent jump in the number of active users on the platform," it added.

The GST council justified the new 5% tax on online food aggregators, arguing that such a move will reduce instances of tax invasion by restaurants. The council meeting notification read that “services by cloud kitchens/central kitchens are covered under ‘restaurant service… under section 9(5) of the CGST Act, 2017’,” will attract this tax rate increase minus the input tax credit.

Such food delivery apps will now be required to collect 5 per cent GST, or Goods and Services Tax, from consumers instead of the restaurant they pick up orders from, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Friday evening after the Council meeting. There would be no extra tax burden on the end consumers taking food delivery from restaurants registered with the GST.