Swiggy has expanded its services to sixteen new cities: Thrissur, Tirupur, Warangal, Aurangabad, Agra, Mangalore, Manipal, Jalandhar, Trichy, Udaipur, Amritsar, Varanasi, Bhubaneshwar, Vellore, Trivandrum and Kota. The food delivery app was already present in 28 other cities across the country, and cites growing consumer demand in Tier 2 and 3 cities for its expansion. According to the COO Vivek Sunder, the app saw thousands of downloads in cities in which it wasn't present. In September, Swiggy expanded to Dehradun, Pondicherry, Mysore, Vijayawada, Nashik, Guwahati, Kanpur and Ludhiana, in partnership with 1,200 restaurants. In the same month, Mint reported that the company was in talks to raise $700 million from Tencent Holdings (and possibly Softbank), despite being “well capitalised”, according to the same report. In September, it also expanded its delivery only kitchen Swiggy Access in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Hyderabad, PTI reported. In July, the company rolled out a membership program called Swiggy Super which provided 1-month and 3-month subscription plans. At that time, Swiggy claimed that the membership had been rolled out to 200,000 users in 7 cities out of its now 44 cities. Swiggy is eyeing expansion into verticals with delivery as its base business: it acquired delivery company Scootsy, it was also looking at grocery delivery and also acqui-hired 48East, a gourmet Asian food startup last year. Founded in 2014, it claims to have partnered with over 40,000 restaurants in 44 cities.
