Food ordering and delivery platform Swiggy has promoted its Vice President for strategy and investments, Phani Kishan Addepalli, to the post of the company’s co-founder. The elevation comes at a time when Swiggy is looking at another fundraising of a billion dollars from investors including SoftBank, according to a report by moneycontrol.com.
Phani Kishan would be the third co-founder of Swiggy along with Sriharsha Majety and Nandan Reddy, who are the company’s original co-founders. Sriharsha Majety announced the move in a letter written to his employees where he called Phani a “fixer and go-to guy for many important problems.” He also said that Phani lived by the values of Swiggy and role models the company’s culture and values.
Sriharsha went on to compliment the newly appointed co-founder for building organisational capability, energy, can-do attitude and founder mentality. “I can’t wait to see him go on and take new challenges to build even more superpowers in the years to come,” the letter read.
Notably, Swiggy was founded in 2014 by Nandan Reddy, Sriharsha Majety and Rahul Jaimini. Phani Kishan joined early in 2015 and has been an important member of the food delivery platform’s core team. Meanwhile, Jaimini left the company in May 2020.
The trend of bringing up new co-founders is not new to the Indian startup ecosystem. Earlier in June this year, Zomato had appointed Akriti Chopra, its chief people officer as the co-founder. Mumbai-based Rebel Foods, which own brands like Faasos, Behrouz Biryani and Oven Story, had elevated 5 company employees to the post of co-founder in 2020.
Swiggy is about to go for another fundraising round with SoftBank expected to invest around $450 to $500 million, according to a report by moneycontrol.com.
