Swiggy will add 2,000 women delivery personnel across 10 cities by March 2019. It said that it has 60 women drivers across 10 cities including Ahmedabad, Kochi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Nagpur and Pune. The company will identify “safe zones” for women drivers to operate in and ask them to complete deliveries by 6pm, a statement said. Swiggy has also rolled out Swiggy Smiles, an insurance and benefits program for its drivers which includes on-call doctors, educational scholarships for drivers and their children, personal loans, and monthly rewards. The company now claims to have partnered with 45,000 restaurants in 45 cities, and says that there has been a 3x growth in volumes of orders in the last financial year. Expansion spree Earlier this month, Swiggy expanded to 16 new cities: Thrissur, Tirupur, Warangal, Aurangabad, Agra, Mangalore, Manipal, Jalandhar, Trichy, Udaipur, Amritsar, Varanasi, Bhubaneswar, Vellore, Trivandrum and Kota. It was already present in 28 other cities, 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. Earlier this year, it opened shop in Chandigarh. Funding In June this year, Swiggy raised Series G funding of $210 million led by existing investor Naspers, new investor DST Global and participation from existing shareholder Meituan-Dianping, which is China’s service e-commerce platform, and new investor…
