Swish vs Blinkit vs Swiggy vs Zepto: The 10-Minute Food Delivery Startup War

In August 2024, three founders in Bengaluru made a bet that sounds either visionary or reckless, depending on who you ask. 

Aniket Shah, Ujjwal Sukheja, and Saran S launched Swish, a startup promising hot food delivered to your door in ten minutes flat. 

But they entered a battlefield where the biggest player had already retreated in defeat.

Zomato, with its billion-dollar war chest and massive data advantage, tried 10-minute delivery thrice:

• First came Zomato Instant in 2022, which folded within months after failing to achieve profitable volume. 

• Then Zomato Everyday, a delivery service between home chefs and customers, which also disappeared. 

• And just this past May, Zomato shut down its third attempt - a 15-minute service called Quick - after 4 months of operation. 

CEO Deepinder Goyal admitted the company saw no meaningful demand increase and that existing restaurant infrastructure couldn't support the model without compromising customer experience.

Yet, months after Swish raised a modest $2M seed round in October 2024, investors poured in $14M more in Series A funding in March 2025 (source). The round valued the infant startup at roughly $60M. 

That's exceptional velocity for a company operating in exactly the space where a market leader had publicly failed. 

So what do Swish's backers see that Zomato apparently missed?

The answer lies in a fundamental shift happening beneath the surface of Indian consumer behavior, and in the architectural differences between attempting instant delivery as a feature versus building a company around it from day one.

Let’s look at their start-up journey!

The Market Timing Paradox

When Zomato Instant launched in 2022, it tried to retrofit ultra-fast delivery onto an existing restaurant aggregation model. The company used "finishing stations" - essentially predictive cloud kitchens stocked with popular dishes. The aim was to use vast amounts of ordering data to forecast neighborhood demand within 2-km, pre-cook likely orders, and deliver when someone taps the app.

But prediction-based models are optimized for volume, not variety. When actual orders didn't match forecasts, food waste piled up. Sometimes, the model did work - but only for a small menu of the most predictable items. It couldn’t be profitable at scale due to this bottleneck.

Market leaders often have the resources to experiment early, but their existing business models become constraints. Sometimes being first can mean being too early to get the model right. 

Swish entered the market in late 2024, after two crucial shifts matured. 

First, Zepto, and then its competitors, had spent three years training Indian consumers that 10-minute delivery wasn't just possible but normal - for groceries. The mental model existed. 

Second, cloud kitchen infrastructure has evolved significantly. What seemed experimental in 2022 had become proven technology by 2024.

Perhaps Zomato wasn't wrong about the demand but simply early in trying to serve it through the wrong infrastructure. Swish just needed to marry the 10-minute infrastructure to food.

Also, soon after Swish competitors launched their own versions of the idea rapidly. When Zomato was alone attempting this, it looked experimental. Now that multiple players are committing, it looks like a legitimate category.

Vertical Integration as Competitive Moat

Just as Swish raised funding, the competitive landscape exploded. 

The players all see the same data: quick commerce is growing faster than traditional food delivery, and consumer expectations around delivery speed are permanently shifting.

What makes this competition fascinating is that everyone except Swish is treating 10-minute food as an extension of an existing business. 

Swiggy's Bolt: 

Swiggy's Bolt partners with existing restaurants, delivering items that need minimal prep time within a two-kilometer radius. It's clever for 2 reasons: 

1. They leveraged the partner network they already have.

2. People already crave for a Burger King or McDonald’s - Bolt makes sure that they get it in 10 mins instead of 45, fulfilling almost a latent demand.

Bolt now contributes roughly 10% of Swiggy's food delivery orders and has now scaled to over 500 cities. That's rapid scaling enabled by platform dynamics. 

But it's also inherently constrained as there is a need of optimizing someone else's kitchen processes, dealing with their quality inconsistencies, and negotiating delivery prioritization with restaurants serving multiple platforms.

The unit economics remain tied to restaurant partnerships and platform fees.

Zepto Cafe:

Zepto took a different approach by building physical cafe locations inside its dark stores. Its promise was to leverage the dark store network already built for groceries, providing quality control through owned locations while maintaining the flexibility to scale rapidly.

The company launched a standalone app for the service, signaling serious commitment. In February 2025, they reached 1,00,000 daily orders, which further increased for the next few months.

However, by May-June, their daily orders volume started dropping due to supply chain issues and untrained staff.

This prompted the suspension of 44 dark stores, changes in the menu, as well as supplier cuts to control cash burn. 

Blinkit's Bistro

Blinkit follows a similar hybrid path to Zepto, using its existing grocery infrastructure to enter food delivery, starting with a pilot in Gurugram in January 2025, assuring to deliver “canteen style” snacks and beverages. (Nostalgia language much?!)

Eternal launched a fourth venture in the same space with a bigger promise against the competition: the company has invested in R&D that helps prepare these meals in 5 minutes without food processors, preservatives, and microwaves (Source).

After 3 failures, the company is gradual with scale, currently operating in Gurugram, Delhi, Noida, and Bengaluru. If their infrastructure investments succeed, it might become the healthiest option among the competitors. 

Swish: 

Swish chose the most capital-intensive path: full vertical integration through what they call "delight centers” (directly opposite to Zomato’s first model). 

These are purpose-built cloud kitchens where Swish controls the entire chain - ingredient sourcing, food preparation, packaging, delivery assignment, and logistics. Every variable is internal. 

The menu offers 150+ SKUs that can be prepared quickly and remain fresh: beverages, snacks, and meals optimized for speed without sacrificing quality.

Swish's model has higher upfront costs but potentially better margins if they achieve density within each delight center's radius.

Operating within a tiny 1.5 to 2 kilometer radius seems like a limitation, but it's actually the strategy. Hyperlocal density means predictable delivery times, lower delivery costs per order, and the ability to maintain food temperature and quality.

Swish exists purely to solve this one problem. That's either a massive vulnerability or a massive advantage, depending on execution.

The projection that India's quick commerce market will reach $57B by 2030 beyond metro cities, creates room for multiple winners. Swish doesn't need to beat Zomato or Swiggy outright. They need to own specific high-density urban neighborhoods where their operational model provides superior service and economics. That's a much more achievable ambition than  industry dominance.

The Health Controversy

Medical professionals have started raising pointed questions about ultra-fast food delivery. The faster the delivery promise, the more likely the food relies on ultra-processed ingredients, pre-cooked components, and preparation shortcuts that prioritize speed over nutritional value. Quick snacks and beverages dominate these menus for a reason - they're the easiest to deliver rapidly without quality deterioration.

10-minute delivery also pressures kitchen staff into rushed preparation that compromises both food safety and quality. When every second counts toward meeting a delivery promise, ingredients get pre-prepped further in advance, food sits longer before orders come in, and the pressure to cut corners intensifies.

Swish's vertical integration potentially addresses some concerns. When you control the kitchen, you control quality inputs and preparation standards. 

But the fundamental tension remains: truly fresh, made-to-order food takes time and the current options might not necessarily be the healthiest options.

The industry largely sidesteps this conversation, focusing instead on convenience and customer demand. And the demand is clearly real - these services are growing rapidly. 

But for founders in this space, ignoring the health dimension is short-sighted. At some point, either regulation or consumer preference shifts could force a reckoning.

While Bistro has attempted to thread this needle (see above), whether consumers care enough about these distinctions to influence purchasing decisions remains unclear. What's certain is that sustainability concerns - both health and environmental - will intensify as this category matures.

Conclusion

The battle over 10-minute food delivery is really about whether speed itself has become a feature people will pay a premium for, or whether it's just table stakes that everyone must offer without pricing power.

Quick commerce groceries solve a planning problem. Ten-minute food solves an impulse problem. Those are different psychological triggers with different willingness to pay.

Swish is essentially testing whether the impulse food market is large enough to support a dedicated player, or whether it's just a feature that aggregation platforms can add without specialized infrastructure. The answer will determine whether vertical integration creates a moat or just adds cost.

All in all, Swish probably has twelve to eighteen months to demonstrate that delight centers achieve healthy unit economics at scale, that customers return frequently enough to justify acquisition costs, and that quality remains consistent as operations expand.

It will clarify whether entering a space where giants failed was contrarian genius or expensive hubris. 

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