Swish Raises $24 Million From Bertelsmann, Accel to Scale 10-Minute Food Delivery in India

Bertelsmann India Investments leads the round as the Bangalore-based startup bets on neighbourhood kitchens to crack India’s $100 billion food services market.

Bangalore, India — Swish, the startup building a 10-minute food delivery network out of hyperlocal kitchens, has raised $24 million in a funding round led by Bertelsmann India Investments (BII). Existing backers Accel, Bain Capital Ventures, and Hara Global also participated, signaling continued investor confidence in India’s rapidly consolidating quick-commerce food space.

The fresh capital arrives as Swish scales a vertically integrated model that controls everything from kitchen operations to last-mile delivery — a structural bet that speed and freshness can be engineered, not outsourced.

What Swish Does Differently

Founded by Aniket Shah, Ujjwal Sukheja, and Saran S, Swish runs a dense network of neighbourhood kitchens designed to cook and deliver fresh meals within an average radius of one kilometre. Rather than aggregating restaurants like traditional food delivery apps, Swish owns the kitchen, the menu, and the courier fleet.

This full-stack approach lets the company optimize for three variables simultaneously: speed, quality, and affordability — a combination the founders argue legacy food delivery platforms have never managed to solve at scale.

Since launch, Swish has expanded across Bangalore, Gurugram, Noida, Delhi, and Ghaziabad, growing to more than a million orders a month while operating in roughly 50 pincodes.

Inside the $24 Million Round

The Series funding round was led by Bertelsmann India Investments, with participation from Accel, Bain Capital Ventures, and Hara Global — all existing investors doubling down rather than new entrants testing the waters. It follows Swish’s earlier ₹282 crore Series B round, pointing to a steady cadence of capital as the startup scales.

“The food services market is about $100B in size, with online food delivery still capturing less than 10% of the market today,” said Aniket Shah, Co-founder and CEO of Swish. “An average Indian consumer consumes food 90–100 times a month, but orders online only four times. Getting fresh, delicious food at the best prices in 10 minutes is an incredibly delightful experience, and our ambition is to make this possible for 100 million consumers.”

Shah added that over 80% of Swish’s orders are delivered in under 15 minutes, a metric the company is using to position itself against both traditional food delivery apps and newer 10-minute grocery players entering the food space.

Why Investors Are Betting on Full-Stack Food Delivery

Pankaj Makkar, Managing Director at Bertelsmann India Investments, framed the investment as a continuation of BII’s thesis on category-owning consumer businesses in India.

“The country’s largest consumer businesses will be built by founders willing to own the entire problem rather than a convenient slice of it,” Makkar said. “We have seen it before in fresh non-veg food at Licious, and we see it again with Swish. Everyday food is the biggest under-served category in Indian consumption, and it has remained that way because no one has managed freshness, affordability, and convenience at the same time.”

The Bigger Picture: India’s Quick Commerce Food Race

Swish’s raise lands amid intensifying competition in India’s quick commerce and hyperlocal delivery sector, where grocery-first players have already normalized 10–15 minute delivery windows. Extending that expectation to freshly cooked meals — rather than packaged goods — is a harder operational problem, requiring real-time kitchen throughput instead of warehouse picking.

Not every bet in this space has paid off: Swiggy recently shut down Snacc, its 15-minute food delivery app, underscoring how difficult fast-format food delivery is to sustain even for established players. At the same time, new entrants keep arriving — Flipkart has launched its own food delivery play against Swiggy and Zomato, joining a fight for India’s $25 billion food delivery market that is only getting more crowded.

Key numbers from the announcement:

• $24 million raised in this round
• 1 million+ orders processed monthly
• ~50 pincodes currently served
• 80% of orders delivered in under 15 minutes
• $100 billion estimated size of India’s food services market
• <10% current online penetration of that market

For a market this large and this under-penetrated, investors appear willing to fund the heavier capital expenditure that comes with owning kitchens outright — a trade-off that promises better margins and quality control if execution holds up at scale.

What’s Next for Swish

With fresh capital in hand, Swish’s stated ambition is to expand its kitchen density well beyond its current five-city footprint and move toward serving 100 million consumers. Whether the unit economics of hyperlocal kitchens hold up outside dense urban clusters like Bangalore and Delhi-NCR will likely determine how far that ambition travels.

Want more India startup funding news as it breaks? Follow KnowStartup for the next round of foodtech and quick-commerce coverage.

Author

Sachin

Sachin Sidharth is a Digital Marketing professional with a master’s degree in Digital Marketing from Coventry University, UK. He has 10+ years of blogging and online marketing experience. He currently heads Digital Acquisition for a leading London-based Fintech firm. At KnowStartup.com He focuses on writing Digital Marketing guides and manages...

Sachin Sidharth is a Digital Marketing professional with a master’s degree in Digital Marketing from Coventry University, UK. He has 10+ years of blogging and online marketing experience. He currently heads Digital Acquisition for a leading London-based Fintech firm. At KnowStartup.com He focuses on writing Digital Marketing guides and manages KnowStartup's Digital Agency rankings of firms across multiple cities in India. You can reach him on Linkedin.

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