After Grocery, India’s biggest e-commerce companies Flipkart, Paytm and Amazon are now planning to explore investments into the food-delivery business. All these e-commerce giants have separately held talks with the Zomato and Swiggy besides cloud kitchen players like Freshmenu for investments.

Flipkart held’s Investment talks with Zomato

Flipkart along with Tencent has discussed investments with Zomato before the food-delivery company entered into an exclusivity agreement with Ant Financial for capital infusion.

Flipkart has now initiated discussions with Swiggy for an investment of up to $100 million. Swiggy and Flipkart are now sharing with Naspers, which is also the largest shareholder in Tencent, as an investor.

Paytm held’s Discussions with Swiggy

Just like Flipkart, Paytm also discussed investments with Swiggy, and now its largest shareholder Ant Financial is in talks with Zomato for investment. Swiggy is now expected to align more closely with Paytm as a payments platform if the Ant investment goes through, although it will also continue to use all other payment modes.

Paytm Plans to Acquire Nearbuy

Paytm is also planning for an advanced talk to acquire online coupon platforms Nearbuy and Little, for which it had held discussions with online travel company Via which was finally bought by US-based Ebix.

Online Retail Grows at 20-30%

“Today we are in a steady state environment where online retail growth is happening at 20-30%,” said Sanjot Malhi, who leads consumer investments at Matrix Partners India. “The reason for this is that the internet penetration is expected to grow to 500 million by 2020, but the current e-commerce proposition does not appeal equally to that entire base. The top 10-20 million customers are behaving the lot like those living in New York or San Francisco, which is why the initial growth is happening very quickly.”