Food delivery platform Swiggy on Thursday said it will invest $700 million (about Rs 5,250 crore) in its express grocery delivery service Instamart.

Swiggy Instamart —launched in Gurgaon and Bangalore last year — is now available across 18 cities and handles over one million orders per week.

In the last few months, Swiggy Instamart has onboarded more than one seller-run dark store every day, a statement said.

A dark store is a large retail facility that resembles a conventional supermarket or other store but is not open to the public, housing goods used to fulfil orders placed online.

By January 2022, it will make deliveries in 15 minutes by having the network of dark stores very close to the majority of its customers, it added.

While traditional e-commerce deliveries take a day or longer, quick commerce (or q-commerce) enables customers to get small quantities of goods to customers in a shorter period of time.

Instamart competes with quick commerce (q-commerce) services offered by players such as Zomato-backed Grofers and Dunzo. Last month, Ola had also started piloting a quick delivery service for items such as groceries in Bangalore.

In November, Grofers had said its dark store network was at over 200 stores, and that it is adding new stores at an aggressive pace. The company is looking at making these deliveries in under 10 minutes.

According to a RedSeer report, the quick commerce sector in India is expected to grow to $5 billion by 2025 from the current $0.3 billion because of a shift in consumer behaviour.