Online food delivery platform Swiggy to buy back ESOPs worth $50 million

Swiggy, a food aggregating platform, which is building AI-led solutions to streamline its food delivery, said it would buy back shares worth $50 million from its 2,000 employees. The shares were issued to them as part of the company’s employee stock option plan (ESOP). 

Swiggy has joined the list of companies that have rewarded their employees this year. Earlier this month, e-commerce company Flipkart provided its 19,000 employees with a total of $700 million after the company's demerger with PhonePe, according to a report in Moneycontrol.

However, the developments come at a time when Indian startups are going through a funding crunch and struggling to raise new funds amid a funding winter.

Meanwhile, Swiggy has bought back ESOPs four times with the size increasing each year since 2018. This is a part of the company's liquidation exercise, which it announced in 2021 to reward its employees based on their performance in 2022 and 2023.

In 2018, Swiggy purchased shares worth $4 million from its employees and spent $9 million in 2020. Later in 2022, the online food delivery company bought back ESOPs worth $23 million.

What are Swiggy's AI-led solutions?

Swiggy on Thursday (July 20, 2023) announced that it would be using generative AI techniques to build products and services to enable intuitive ordering experiences. With AI-powered neural search, the company aims to help users conversationally discover food and groceries while receiving tailored recommendations.

"Swiggy's neural search enables users to search using conversational and open-ended queries and receive recommendations tailored to their specific needs. This makes it easier for consumers to find what they're looking for without having to use or remember specific keywords," Madhusudhan Rao, CTO of Swiggy, said in a blog post.

Moreover, the company said that the neural search capability had been built using a Large Language Model (LLM), adapted to understand the terminology related to dishes, recipes, restaurants, and Swiggy-specific search data.