Swiggy co-founder Phani Kishan Addepalli to take over as Instamart head

Karthik Gurumurthy—the head of Instamart Swiggy's grocery delivery business—has said that he would be taking a sabbatical from his current role. Phani Kishan Addepalli, CEO of SuprDaily, will take charge of the vertical. 

“Today its a large business, almost a billion dollar business and am just humbled to see how big the business has grown to.. The power of Swiggy brand, the vision of founders and their insane customer obsession... This was just built on a great vision of our founders and the support and encouragement they gave us through this journey, just inspiring and of course a special call out to Nandan Reddy who has been the real architect of this (sic),” Gurumurthy, Senior Vice President at Swiggy, wrote in a post on social media site LinkedIn.

Addepalli was elevated to the post of Co-founder of Swiggy in 2021.

Swiggy started grocery delivery with Instamart in 2020. It is now the food delivery company's second largest business. The vertical offers quick and scheduled delivery of groceries.

According to a report published by investment firm Prosus, which holds 33% stake in the company, Instamart clocked a gross merchandise value of $257 million from January to June, 2022.

In 2021, Swiggy's CEO, Sriharsha Majety, said Instamart was on track to grow to a $1 billion GMV business by 2022. Swiggy had invested $700 million in Instamart over 2022. 

Swiggy has been restructuring its business ahead of a reported IPO. The company sold its cloud kitchen business to Kitchens@ earlier this month and shut down its meat marketplace in January. It also laid off 380 people across functions. 

The company's close competitor Zomato entered the grocery delivery space with the acquisition of Blinkit in June last year for $626 million.