During Japanese rule it became the wealthy, modernized country it is today. There are plenty of places you can visit Japanese hill towns, tea houses, and hot springs used by the colonial rulers. While these places are quaint and charming, historians tell us that the Japanese were cruel rulers and forced local women to be their concubines.

The other 97.7% are ethnically Chinese. This is because Taiwan was ruled by the Qing Dynasty for 200 years from 1683 to 1895. During this time, the locals were pushed out in the same way native Americans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders were by Europeans. This isn’t an upbeat Taiwan fact but it’s important to know.

Nowadays, there are just 500,000 indigenous people made up of eight different tribal groups. Sadly, their 26 native languages have become almost extinct. Unemployment rates are high and education levels low. However, since the 80s there has been a bit of a revival and several cities host indigenous cultural events. Will it be enough?

These include superstition relating to various numbers, reliance on Chinese medicine, and relatively low religious rates. Only 50% of the population is religious, most commonly following Buddhism and Taoism.
 

Now for a positive fact about Taiwan. Compared to its neighboring countries like Japan, Korea, and China where LGBT people face discrimination, Taiwan is forward-thinking and progressive.

Red is used at weddings. This may seem odd to Westerners but I’m not so sure: red is the color of passion and love universally so why shouldn’t it be used at weddings?

We also learned that despite economic rough waters throughout India and the rest of the world, Swiggy’s numbers continue to climb. This is likely because of the additional services that it has provided in recent expansions. As of the last count, Swiggy received just under 2 million visits to its website in the last 30 days. The average monthly visits for services is just under 11 million. On average, Swiggy has experienced a monthly growth rate of 1.64 percent, which is fairly remarkable as it translates into increased revenues and profitability.

The owners of Swiggy have not indicated any desire to file an IPO and take the company public. The funding that it currently receives from its venture capital investors is more than enough to fully fund all of Swiggy’s expansion efforts. Swiggy may remain one of India’s largest privately-owned companies as there is no need for it to offer shares on the public stock exchange markets. We fully expect to see Swiggy continue to grow and expand throughout India, and perhaps other parts of the world in the years to come.

Swiggy is a delivery platform but it very much relies on technology to achieve its goals. The company’s website and services use a total of 38 different technologies that are distributed among 35 different technology products. A few of these tech products used include jQuery, Google Analytics, HTML5, Viewport Meta, IPhone Mobile Compatible, Apple Mobile Web Clips Icon, and dozens of others. There is a lot more behind the scenes that have to take place to provide the smooth and seamless delivery services that Swiggy’s customers currently enjoy.

Swiggy has also set a board of directors in place to oversee the operations and to provide advisement to the group of talented executives leading the company forward. It’s a much smaller group but does its job effectively. The group is composed of Anand Daniel, joining the board in 2015 through the present. Larry Illng, Ashutosh Sharma, and Jayant Goel are the other three members that make up the board of directors.

Swiggy’s co-founders are Sriharsha Majety and Nandan Reddy. Both young men were born and raised in India and were just in their early 20s when they launched the operation. They became friends when working together on photography projects at college. They shared their vision for creating an e-commerce website that could help to streamline shipping and courier services throughout India. This resulted in the founding of Bundl, a company that provides logistics for such activities. When Bundl was halted, the pair rebranded it and geared the services to the food delivery market, and this is how Swiggy was created. It became an enterprise for providing a platform for the food services industry.

We also learned that Swiggy is doing its part to help keep its employees safe and protected from the ongoing dangers of the pandemic. The company announced in 2021 that it would pay for the costs involved with the vaccination for its delivery partners. In response to the need for vaccination sites to accomplish this lofty goal, Swiggy set up a Health Hub to provide access to the vaccination clinics across Chennai, Tamil Nadu in March. The hope is that the vaccination of the workers who partner with Swiggy to get deliveries made would help to slow the spread of the disease throughout India, and to help the country return to a more normal state of business operations.

According to Crunchbase, Swiggy is concerned with speed and efficiency. The platform has been successful in its offer of an on-demand food delivery service that acts as a go-between for neighborhood restaurants to facilitate speedy delivery services in an on-demand format. The food is picked up from restaurants, then quickly delivered directly to the customers’ doors whether it’s at a local business or their homes.

In August of 2020, Swiggy saw a new market that would increase business. With the pandemic forcing people to remain in their homes, the demand for grocery deliveries skyrocketed. The founders of the company developed a new grocery delivery platform that they called InstaMart in August of 2020. This helped to get Swiggy back into a fuller operation to help meet the demand for this important service.

When Reddy and Majety designed Swiggy, they were careful to define its purpose. The new enterprise would become a platform for food delivery dedicated to this niche in the industry, unlike Bundl. They set the initial focus on defining logistics, then locking in key resources. With their plan in place, they had a list of target markets, and in 2014, with technology in place they began offering services in the city of Bangalore.

We also learned that Swiggy has had no problem securing venture capital backing from wealthy investment firms. It is considered a late-stage venture capital company that has held more than 13 rounds of VC fundraising. The most recent round of fundraising closed on April 5, 2021, in the form of a Series J funding round that was led by Carmignac and Falcon Edge Capital, most recent investors were joined by a group of 21 other investors.

Swiggy has only been in business for a little over six years. It’s considered to be in its infancy as far as businesses go. The service was officially launched in 2014 in Bangalore, India. Even though it hasn’t been in business for long, it has expanded its reach to become the largest of its kind in the country, according to Wikipedia. This makes it one big baby.

When the worldwide pandemic hit, nearly every kind of business was impacted. While delivery services were in high demand, the number of business closures and people who were unemployed hit all segments of the economy in India as well as throughout other parts of the world. Swiggy had grown large in the size of its network and had employed thousands of workers in various parts of India. Because of the lack of businesses in operation, the Covid-19 pandemic forced Swiggy to lay off more than 1000 of its workforce.

Swiggy has also made investments in other startup companies. On February 26, 2019, Swiggy invested an undisclosed amount to Fingerlix for its Series C round of funding as the lead investor. This was followed by a $1.9 million investment on April 7, 2020.

After being in business for just 6 short years, Swiggy has already acquired four other companies. These are businesses that provided services and technologies that helped Swiggy to more quickly expand the number of services it provides, as well as expand into new regions of the country. The first company purchased 48 East bought on December 13, 2017, for an undisclosed amount. The second acquisition was for a company called Scootysy which was purchased by Swiggy for $8 million on August 2, 2018. This was followed by the acquisition of Supr Daily on September 1, 2018, and the most recent acquisition was for Kint.io on February 4, 2019, for an undisclosed amount.

Swiggy’s growth and expansion have been remarkable for a new startup company. What started as a small platform in Bangalore has spread throughout India. As of March of 2019, Swiggy offered services in 100 cities throughout India. The company launched Swiggy Stores to include general product delivery services.

 

Swiggy was clearly on the move. After branching out with Swiggy Stores in March of 2019, it took the operation a step further by adding a new division. Swiggy Go is the name of the new service that Swiggy added in September of 2019. The service provided instant pick-up and drop services throughout all its locations in India. This included a variety of different items with everything from laundry and other retail items to parcel deliveries for businesses and individuals. This marked an important expansion of the services Swiggy offered and it helped to diversify its offerings to reach a larger segment of the population in need of delivery services.

Swiggy falls under the ownership of Bundl, which didn’t turn out to be the kind of company the two enjoyed doing. They were operating a business-to-business venture when they wanted to deal more with a business-to-consumer operation, which are two different types of enterprises. The co-founders consulted with Rahum Jaimini formerly at Mynta to found Bundl Technologies as the parent company and Swiggy as its subsidiary.