Swish Pilots Swish Go in Bengaluru, Opening Its App to Outside Restaurants in Challenge to Swiggy and Zomato

Swish, the Bengaluru-based quick food delivery startup, has started piloting Swish Go, a service that lets customers order from third-party restaurants and cloud kitchens, putting the two-year-old company in direct competition with India's food delivery leaders, Swiggy and Zomato.

The service, reported by Inc42 on 7 October, is live in select pincodes of Bengaluru. It is being advertised with no packaging fees and no platform fees, the add-on charges that have become a regular source of friction between delivery apps and their users.

Swish Go marks a departure from the model that Swish was built on. Until now, customers could order only from kitchens the company owns and runs itself, with food delivered in about 10 to 15 minutes. Orders on Swish Go will not carry that speed promise and are expected to take longer.

From own kitchens to a marketplace

Swish was founded in 2024 by Aniket Shah, Ujjwal Sukheja and Saran S. The company built what it calls a vertically integrated model, owning the kitchens, the ordering platform and the delivery fleet. Its cloud kitchens serve customers within roughly a 1 km radius, which allows it to deliver food in minutes rather than the half-hour or more typical of conventional delivery.

Shah has argued that controlling every step was the only way to guarantee quality. “Owning every part of the decision in the food supply chain is the only way to serve high-quality, fresh food,” he told Inc42 in March. The company currently operates in nearly 50 pincodes across Bengaluru, Gurugram, Noida, Delhi and Ghaziabad.

Swish Go adds a different layer. For the pilot, the company has brought on quick-service brands including Nothing Before Coffee, Mealy and Taaka Chinese, among others, according to Inc42. That gives users a broader menu than Swish's own kitchens can offer, a common limitation of the own-kitchen approach, where every new cuisine requires new recipes, staff and equipment.

Inc42 said it had sent questions to Swish about the service. The company had not publicly detailed how it charges restaurants, what delivery fees apply, or when Swish Go might extend beyond the Bengaluru pilot.

For readers unfamiliar with the Indian market, the model Swish Go adopts is the one Swiggy and Zomato use: the app takes orders for independent restaurants, sends a rider to collect the food and earns a commission from the restaurant, often alongside fees charged to the customer. Swish's own-kitchen model avoided those commissions entirely because it cooked everything itself.

The timing reflects the limits of a pure quick-food model. Swish's existing business depends on dense neighbourhoods where enough orders can be served from a single kitchen. Adding outside restaurants could lift order volumes and help keep its delivery riders busy outside peak meal times, though the company has not described its reasoning publicly.

Investors have backed the bet

Swish has raised $78 million in external funding to date, Inc42 reported. Its investors include Hara Global, Bain Capital Ventures, Accel, Alteria Capital and Stride Ventures. In March 2026 it raised a $38 million Series B, about ₹356 crore, co-led by Hara Global and Bain Capital Ventures, to expand its 10-minute delivery across cities, automate kitchens and build out its supply chain.

That followed a $14 million round in March 2025 from Accel, Hara Global and Unacademy founder Gaurav Munjal. Inc42 has also reported a more recent $24 million round led by Bertelsmann India Investments. At the time of its Series B, Swish said it was handling about 20,000 orders a day.

The company has expanded quickly. When it raised its Series B in March, Swish operated cloud kitchens only in Bengaluru. Shah said then that the company was “poised to accelerate our expansion in a lot more neighbourhoods across cities”, and within seven months it had reached Gurugram, Noida, Delhi and Ghaziabad. Swish's first institutional backer was Accel, which led a $2 million seed round to fund its 10-minute food delivery idea.

Quick food delivery has proved hard to make profitable. It requires heavy spending on kitchens, staff and riders, and margins on low-ticket meals are thin. Swiggy shut its 15-minute food app Snacc about a year after launch, reportedly over the economics, and Delhi NCR startup Zing abandoned quick food delivery, saying it had overestimated demand, and is looking to pivot to groceries.

Against that backdrop, Swish's investors have been betting that controlling the full chain gives it better unit economics than rivals who rely on partners. Swish Go tests whether the brand and delivery network it has built can carry a lower-margin marketplace business on top.

A crowded and contested market

Swish is entering a field where restaurant owners have long complained about the commissions charged by the two market leaders, and where several new players are trying to exploit that discontent. Rapido's food delivery service Ownly charges zero commissions and passes the savings on to customers, Inc42 noted, while Swiggy has launched Toing, which aims to keep prices low by cutting commissions, batching orders and limiting delivery radius.

The no-fee pitch is aimed at consumers. Platform fees, which both Swiggy and Zomato have introduced and raised in recent years, along with packaging and small-order charges, can add noticeably to the price of a meal. Swish's brand has been built around low and transparent pricing, and Swish Go extends that promise to food it does not cook.

Scale remains the biggest hurdle. Swiggy and Zomato have restaurant networks across hundreds of Indian cities and years of data on demand, delivery times and pricing. A pilot in a handful of Bengaluru pincodes does not challenge that, but it does give Swish a way to test demand in neighbourhoods where it already has riders and customers, at relatively low cost and without building new kitchens.

For readers outside India, the experiment is part of a wider contest over how food is delivered in the country's largest cities, where speed, menu choice and price are being traded off against each other by both incumbents and startups. Swish's own kitchens bet on speed; Swish Go bets on choice and price.

How the pilot performs will determine whether Swish rolls it out more widely. If it can attract enough restaurants and keep fees off the bill without losing money on each order, it would give the company a second line of business alongside its kitchens. If not, Swish Go may remain a local experiment in a market that has already seen several ambitious delivery models retreat.