Tencent is making yet another big bet on India’s fast-growing tech industry.
The Chinese company was one of several investors that just contributed to a $1 billion round of funding for Indian food delivery app Swiggy.
Nearly 70% of the new investment came from Tencent’s biggest shareholder, South Africa’s Naspers. Tencent (TCEHY) did not reveal the size of its own investment.
Naspers (NAPRF) announced the latest funding round Thursday.
The deal values Swiggy at $3.3 billion, according to Indian media reports, up from $1 billion at the end of June 2018. A spokeswoman for the company declined to comment on its valuation.
Naspers, which owns 31% of Tencent, first invested in Swiggy in 2017 and has led multiple rounds of funding into the startup since then.
The South African conglomerate, which started in 1915 as a small publishing house, has built a web of tech investments across 120 countries in some of the world’s best-known startups.
Its other investments in India include online classifieds business OLX, travel website MakeMyTrip and education platform BYJU’s, into which it led a $540 million funding round earlier this week.
Naspers also got $1.6 billion from Walmart’s (WMT) blockbuster takeover of India’s top e-commerce company, Flipkart, selling its 11% stake to the Arkansas-based retailer.
Tencent is no stranger to India’s tech scene either, with its own stake in Flipkart as well as an investment in the country’s biggest ride-hailing firm Ola.
But Swiggy marks a new foray for the Chinese tech company. The food delivery service, which Naspers CEO Bob van Dijk described to CNN as “the fastest growing company I’ve seen in a decade,” works with more than 50,000 restaurants across 50 Indian cities.
