Zomato has lost plenty of co-founders over the years, and Swiggy has now lost one too.
Swiggy announced on Friday that Nandan Reddy, co-founder and head of innovation, will step down from his executive role and vacate his board seat. He is leaving to start his own venture — in an email to employees, Reddy said there were areas he had been “deeply curious and passionate about” and wanted to give them the time and energy they deserved.
Who Is Nandan Reddy?
Reddy is one of Swiggy’s original co-founders, alongside group CEO Sriharsha Majety. Both are BITS Pilani graduates who built Swiggy from the ground up after it was founded in 2014. A third co-founder, Rahul Jaimini, is an IIT Kharagpur alumnus. Together, the trio navigated Swiggy through a brutal shakeout in food tech during 2015–16 — a period when rivals like SpoonJoy and Dazo shut down, and even Zomato and Foodpanda were forced to lay off staff.
Reddy holds roughly a 1% stake in Swiggy, which went public in November 2024. At IPO, his shares were valued at approximately Rs. 638 crore.
Most recently, Reddy led Swiggy’s concierge app Crew. He will be succeeded in that role by food marketplace CEO Rohit Kapoor. “I believe we are laying the early foundations of a massive new consumer category,” Reddy wrote in his farewell note, adding that he was confident in Kapoor’s ability to scale it.
Board Changes
With Reddy’s exit, Swiggy is reshaping its board. Chief Growth Officer Phani Kishan and CFO Rahul Bothra — both early Swiggy hands — will join as directors. Renan De Castro Alves Pinto of Prosus Ventures will come on board as a nominee director, replacing Roger Rabalais of the Dutch technology investor. CEO Majety called Kishan and Bothra “instrumental in steering the company through its most defining chapters.”
A Well-Worn Pattern in Indian Startups
Co-founder exits are a recurring feature of India’s startup landscape, and Swiggy’s rival Zomato offers the starkest illustration. Zomato’s original co-founder Pankaj Chaddah quit in 2018 to pursue outside interests. Three more executives who had been elevated to the co-founder title — Gaurav Gupta, Mohit Gupta, and CTO Gunjan Patidar — subsequently departed within a few years of Zomato’s IPO.
Flipkart, India’s first startup to reach a $20 billion valuation, followed a similar arc. Sachin Bansal exited at the time of the Walmart acquisition in 2018 — later admitting he was deeply unhappy about an exit he felt was not entirely on his own terms. Binny Bansal left months later under separate circumstances.
The pattern reflects a structural reality of venture-backed startups: as companies mature, list publicly, and shift from founder-led hustle to institutional governance, the original builders often find less room to operate — or simply feel the pull of starting anew. For Reddy, who spent over a decade building Swiggy from a two-person idea into a publicly listed giant, it appears to be the latter.
What he builds next will be worth watching.