Swiggy is working with government regulators and partners like drone manufacturers to execute the pilot.
The company believes the transit from warehouses to locations at the heart of the city – from where delivery partners set off for the customer’s doorstep – is challenged by inefficiency.
“Today, you move them [inventory] via trucks or tell the customer you are out of stock. Now, the ‘middle mile’ delivery, meaning the transit from the warehouse to the pod [a collection center in the city], can be optimized by drones,” CTO Dale Vaz told reporters on the sidelines of tech summit CTOtalk in Chennai.
“We are looking to partner with software companies and startups that offer drone-as-a-service. And, there are also regulations involved. The flight corridors have been approved by the government,” Vaz said, adding that the pilot would take off soon.
Earlier, drone maker Garuda Aerospace had said it had gotten on board Swiggy’s initiative to evaluate the feasibility of drones for its instant grocery delivery Instamart. Vaz said efforts around drone delivery at customers’ doorsteps may involve hazards of misuse, fraud, and safety constraints, but the middle-mile opportunity was insulated from such challenges.
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Vaz is a former Amazon India top executive in charge of software engineering. At Swiggy, he currently oversees, among other divisions, a 700-strong engineering team.
Swiggy’s experimental drones fly amid a holistic attempt from food delivery companies to make their wares more accessible, and just in time for customers. On Swiggy’s radar are segments where the demand during the day could be ad-hoc and unpredictable, but Vaz said the company has decidedly stayed away from requiring partners to deliver groceries or certain food categories in under ten minutes: “Frankly, at Swiggy, we’ve never played that segment. And, I don’t know if there’s a real customer need where they say, ‘I need my tomatoes in nine minutes.”
Vaz spoke about the drone pilot in the context of a technology company’s varied moon shots, with little visibility into which ones can be commercialized and which ones might fall by the wayside. A former Infosys executive, Vaz said the correlation between revenue and employee count – particularly engineers working on experimental tech – does not hold tight across all businesses. That is especially so in companies striving to create new categories, or compete in markets still in their evolutionary phases.
For IT and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) businesses, the math was relatively simpler. For businesses involving the use of technology for non-tech businesses, like Swiggy, the equation was far more complex, he said. “Ät some point, maybe, when the business is mature, you can build a correlation between your wage bill and business growth, but not when your markets and customers are changing.”
Swiggy is leveraging machine learning across its segments, from prioritizing customer preferences on the app based on past orders and driver availability to strengthening the chatbot capabilities on support said Vaz. The Bengaluru-headquartered, 8-year-old startup’s valuation surpassed $10 billion after a January 2022 fundraising led by US-based asset manager Invesco.
