At 9.30 a.m. on a Wednesday in July, before most people had even punched in to Swiggy’s corporate office in Bengaluru, Sriharsha Majety rang up a senior executive at the company. The 39-year-old co-founder and chief executive of the food-and-grocery-delivery major wanted to know why the dashboard showing the number of orders was blinking red.

“One of the darkstores had serviceability and manpower issues,” the executive recalled telling Majety on the phone.

That’s how the CEO’s days start now, a scan of the numbers, followed by an immediate call to the relevant city head.

Then, Majety heads to the office where he spends 80% of the day in meetings—so much so that people think the boardroom is their CEO’s favourite place to hang out.

In his tenth year at the helm, Majety is steering Swiggy through its most testing phase. 

After dominating India’s nascent quick-commerce sector, Instamart—which commanded more than half the market in 2022—slid to second place by January 2024, with barely a third of the market. Its share had fallen by 20 percentage points. Now, its rival Blinkit has grown to more than twice its size, and Zepto, still burning cash, is nipping at its heels.

Besides, Swiggy has been cutting fat—shutting down several side projects, most recently its pick-up-and-drop service, Genie—but the diet hasn’t yet bulked up the market share. Eternal (formerly Zomato) was valued at 2.5 times Swiggy when the latter went public in November 2024; today, the gap is roughly 3X.

That has left Majety—known to colleagues as Harsha—more exacting than ever. The priority is simple: win back some ground in quick commerce. And to assist him, Majety has the aid of the “M-team” (M for management), a sort of Swiggy analogue to Amazon’s “S-team”, the senior management team charged with raising the company’s growth targets every year.

But the fight in quick commerce is nothing like that in food delivery, which is a duel between Swiggy and Eternal. Zepto, Tata’s Bigbasket, Flipkart’s Minutes, and even Amazon Now want to leave nothing to chance. To reclaim its past glory, Swiggy—like Majety—is embracing a behavioural change.

Swiggy’s number-one nice guy

“Harsha is very polite, but extremely demanding, too, because this is a business he has built from nothing,” said a former Swiggy executive.