Rohit Kapoor on Swiggy's food delivery slowdown; Group life insurance gains traction
Rohit Kapoor on Swiggy's food delivery slowdown; Group life insurance gains traction
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Also in the letter:
Pushing value meals and 10-min food delivery to revive growth: Swiggy's Rohit Kapoor
What's happening:
Expanding delivery-friendly categories
Drawing low-frequency users into the fold with value bundles
Scaling 10-minute deliveries via its Bolt platform
By the numbers:
Swiggy's food delivery GOV grew 17.6% YoY in Q4
Bolt now accounts for 12% of Swiggy's delivery volumes
Food delivery covers around 700 cities; density, not geography, is now the focus
Also Read:
Why it matters:
On restaurant partners:
Also Read:
New-age life insurance firms tap group products to boost business
Driving the news:
Acko has written life insurance premiums worth Rs 63 crore.
Go Digit has crossed Rs 1,000 crore.
CreditAccess has processed close to Rs 200 crore in life insurance premiums.
Different paths:
Beyond the numbers:
It allows for quick ramp-up in premium volumes
It helps test systems and processes for corporate sales, ahead of a retail push.
It ensures a smoother claims settlement experience for customers.
Challenges remain:
Trust takes longer to build in life insurance
Higher ticket size products need more persuasion and often, physical intermediation.
Claims settlement is complex and often requires last-mile human support
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What's next:
Krutrim finds few takers for its LLMs and cloud products
Driving the news:
Founders cited poor documentation as a key issue with Krutrim's products.
They also flagged a lack of technical maturity.
Many startups continue to prefer established hyperscalers like Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services.
More than 20 employees have exited the company since 2024.
Tell me more:
Also Read:
ETtech Done Deals
Udaan closes latest funding round at $114 million:
Round details:
Furniture retailer Pepperfry raises Rs 43 crore:
Wealthtech startup Stable Money raises $20 million:
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Tata Electronics eyes Malaysia foray via chip fab acquisition:
Infosys paid CEO Salil Parekh Rs 80.62 crore as salary in FY25:
Nykaa shares drop over 5% despite strong Q4 performance:
Tesla unlikely to make in India: All you need to know |
Global Picks We Are Reading
Happy Tuesday! As the food delivery market cools, aggregators are scrambling to find growth avenues. This and more in today's ETtech Morning Dispatch.■ Krutrim AI's uptake struggles■ ETtech Done Deals■ Tata Electronics' Malaysia forayRohit Kapoor, CEO (food marketplace), SwiggyAs the food delivery market cools, Swiggy is turning to quick meals , affordable combos, and deeper city penetration to stoke demand.In an exclusive interview with ET, Swiggy's food marketplace CEO Rohit Kapoor said growth will now come from low-frequency users and category innovation, not merely from city expansion. He also called for a more open dialogue between platforms and restaurants on commissions.Swiggy is focusing on three key growth drivers in food delivery:With quick commerce eating into food delivery profits, Swiggy and Zomato are under pressure to revive their core businesses. Kapoor says there's latent demand to tap — but unlocking it depends on restaurant supply, better aggregator-partner dynamics, and faster fulfilment.Aggregators' ties with restaurant partners have been strained in recent years over the commissions rates. Kapoor acknowledged the need for more conversation, but argued the current narrative often overlooks the larger economic shift aggregators have enabled.Acko, Go Digit and CreditAccess, three new age life insurance players licensed in 2023, have completed their first full financial year in FY25. Industry data shows that in their initial phase, all three have leaned heavily on group insurance policies to drive early growth.Data sourced from the Life Insurance Council reveals sharp contrasts in their premium collections.Go Digit continues to scale rapidly in general insurance, while Acko is betting on a digital-first, direct-to-consumer model to disrupt traditional distribution.Early trends suggest that the trio have focused on employer-employee group life products and credit-linked insurance policies. Why this strategy?While these players made waves in general insurance, industry insiders say life insurance will be a tougher battleground. Why is that?ETtech Top 5 and Morning Dispatch are must-reads for India's tech and business leaders, including startup founders, investors, policy makers, industry insiders and employees.Interested? Reach out to us at spotlightpartner@timesinternet.in to explore sponsorship opportunities.Bhavish Aggarwal, founder, KrutrimIn a setback to Bhavish Aggarwal and the broader Indian AI ambitions, several founders and investors told ET that Krutrim large language models (LLMs) and cloud offerings have received a lukewarm response from the market.Krutrim, the AI venture backed by the Ola group, became India's first AI unicon in 2024, after raising $50 million at a $1 billion valuation . But the company has since faced product roadblocks and leadership churn.Krutrim offers a chatbot and cloud services, but usability issues persist. Two founders reported difficulties simply logging into the chatbot. Similar issues surfaced with Krutrim cloud.The AI model also suffers from high latency, which refers to response time, deterring potential users. In tests reviewed by ET, Krutrim's AI chatbot took 41 seconds to generate a response to a single prompt. In contrast, ChatGPT-4o and DeepSeek responded in under 10 seconds.Vaibhav Gupta, CEO, UdaanB2B ecommerce platform Udaan has raised $114 million in a fresh funding round led by existing investors, M&G Prudential (UK) and Lightspeed Venture Partners.The round closed at a flat valuation of $1.8 billion and includes the previously disclosed $75 million investment from the same two investors, which founder and CEO Vaibhav Gupta announced at a town hall earlier this year.Omnichannel furniture and home goods company Pepperfry has raised Rs 43.3 crore from existing investors Norwest Venture Partners, Goldman Sachs, General Electric Pension Trust, Growth Equity Opportunity Fund, and Panthera Growth Partners, among others.Wealthtech startup Stable Money, which provides digital fixed-return investment products, has raised $20 million (Rs 173 crore) in a funding round led by Infosys cofounder Nandan Nilekani's Fundamentum Partnership.Tata Electronics is in talks with several global semiconductor companies including X-Fab, DNeX and Globetronics to acquire a fabrication or outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) plant in Malaysia.Indian IT major Infosys chief executive officer (CEO) Salil Parekh received a 22% rise in his annual compensation to Rs 80.6 crore for the fiscal year 2024-25 ending March, the company's annual report showed.Shares of Nykaa parent FSN E-commerce declined as much as 5.11% to 192.85 a piece during Monday's trade. The scrip closed 4.33% lower at Rs 194.45 per share, compared to a 0.09% decline in the benchmark Sensex. The counter opened 1.1% lower at Rs 201, against the previous closing of Rs 203.25 on the BSE.Electric vehicle maker Tesla, helmed by Elon Musk, is not keen on manufacturing in India despite the government wooing it aggressively through policy incentives.■ A Neuralink rival just tested a brain implant in a person ( Wired ■ 'Humanity deserves better': Jony Ive and Laurene Powell Jobs on tech's next chapter ( FT ■ This giant microwave may change the future of war ( MIT Technology Review
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