Swiggy has appointed Swapnil Bajpai as Chief Executive Officer of its Dineout and Scenes businesses, placing a long-serving company insider at the helm of two verticals that sit at the centre of the food-tech giant’s ambition to evolve well beyond food delivery.
The appointment, communicated internally and confirmed by industry sources, formalises a leadership structure that Swiggy has been building since its acquisition of Dineout in 2022. For much of the period following that deal, the platform continued under its founding team, including co-founder Ankit Mehrotra, to preserve continuity in merchant relationships. That chapter has now closed. With Bajpai in the CEO role, Dineout and Scenes enter a new phase marked by full integration into Swiggy’s broader ecosystem and dedicated profit accountability.
Bajpai is not a new face at Swiggy. He has held multiple senior roles across business development, supply, sales, and monetisation within the company, most recently serving as Senior Vice President and Business Head for Dineout, Assure, and Lynk. That background, spanning both operational and commercial functions, makes him a calibrated choice for a vertical that needs to grow revenue while managing a very different cost structure from Swiggy’s core delivery business.
Beyond Delivery
The going-out category matters to Swiggy for a specific reason: economics. Food delivery, for all its scale, is a logistics-heavy operation with thin margins. Dineout and Scenes operate on a fundamentally different model. With no last-mile infrastructure to manage, the revenue profile here is driven by commissions on restaurant bookings and prepaid deals, advertising and merchant services, and event ticketing through the Scenes platform.
When Swiggy acquired Dineout, it was bringing in a business already well-established in the restaurant discovery and dining-out segment. The combined platform gave Swiggy access to in-restaurant spending and consumer data from a part of the food journey it had not previously touched. Scenes, focused on nightlife and curated experiences, took that logic further, expanding Swiggy’s reach into discretionary consumer spending beyond the meal itself.
Together, the two verticals represent Swiggy’s clearest bet on becoming a broader consumer platform rather than a category-specific delivery app.
A Competitive Stage
The dining-out space is not uncontested. Rival Zomato has been building out its own going-out proposition, bundling discounts, memberships, and restaurant payment features to drive engagement beyond delivery orders. Both platforms are racing to capture a larger share of consumer time and wallet across the full arc of eating out, from discovery to experience.
In that environment, leadership continuity and commercial focus matter. Bajpai’s background in monetisation, both within food delivery and Dineout, positions him to execute on the commercial levers the vertical needs to pull. Expanding merchant adoption across Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities, deepening advertising revenue, and integrating Scenes more tightly into Swiggy’s core app are all expected to be immediate priorities.
The Bigger Picture
Before joining Swiggy, Bajpai spent significant time at Procter and Gamble, where he managed trade programmes and regional sales operations, and at Reckitt as Regional Sales Manager. It is a background in structured commercial environments that tends to produce a certain kind of operator: one who understands how to extract value from distribution networks and scale monetisation methodically.
That profile aligns with where Dineout and Scenes need to go. The platform has the merchant relationships and the consumer intent. The next phase is about converting that into consistent, high-quality revenue.
For Swiggy, the appointment is one more signal that its transformation from a delivery-first company into a multi-layered consumer platform is not a distant aspiration. It is an organisational reality that is now being staffed and held accountable. How effectively Bajpai can build on the foundation already in place will, in no small measure, determine whether that ambition translates into durable business value.
