Bengaluru, India-based food delivery startup, Swiggy, has reportedly closed a $35 million Series C round of fundraising led by existing investors SAIF Partners, Accel Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, and Apoletto Asia Ltd, who collectively committed US$26.75 million to the round, according to Live Mint.

 

The round completed by the startup that claims to be the second biggest in India after outranking Foodpanda last month, also included new investors, New York-based Harmony Partners and Singapore-based RB Investments Pte Ltd.

 

Swiggy is currently operating in eight cities across India – Gurgaon, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata, and Chennai, with 5,000 restaurants, and completing almost 1 million orders per month.  Although these number sound impressive, Swiggy’s scale remains comparatively small in a sector that is approaching a value of $15 billion in India.

 

The company plans to use the new capital to strengthen its presence in the market, and to fund technological upgrades that will improve the vendor and customer experience while shortening average delivery times, Swiggy co-founder, Nandan Reddy told Business Standard.

 

The round has happened at a time when others in the industry have had to cut back on operations or shutter their business after venture capital firms have become more cautious as burn rates within the sector were topping $1.5 million to $2 million per month. Startups have now turned their focus away from lavish spending to gain market share, and toward earning revenue.

 

“There is a funding slowdown,” Abhishek Goyal, co-founder of Tracxn told Live Mint.  “Typically, in a soft market, new investors do not like to invest a lot early on. When the market is soft, they enter with a small sum and ask existing investors to pump in most of the money.”

 

For Swiggy, this round follows a $15 million Series B in June 2015 led by Norwest Venture Partners who committed $7 million, and included Accel Partners who committed $3 million, SAIF Partners who committed $4 million, and Apoletto who invested $1.18 million. The company’s Series A occurred in April 2015 raising $1.77 million from Accel Partners and SAIF Partners.

 

This most recent round brings the company’s total amount raised to date to $53 million, according to TechCrunch.