Milkbasket raises $5.5 million in Series-B funding: Details here
What's the story
Online grocery start-up Milkbasket has raised $5.5 million in a Series-B round of funding. The push for the five-year-old Gurugram-based company comes as the demand for home delivery of essentials like vegetables, dairy items, and other FMCG products continues to surge due to the COVID-19 pandemic keeping people locked in their homes. Here's more about Milkbasket and its latest fund-raise.
Start-up
Milkbasket: Enabling last-mile home delivery of essentials
Founded in 2015 by Anant Goel, Ashish Goel, Anurag Jain, and Yatish Talvadia, Milkbasket is a start-up catering to household needs with last-mile delivery. The start-up serves 130,000 households across Gurugram, Noida, Dwarka, Ghaziabad, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru with over 9,000 products spanning across categories ranging from fruits, vegetables, dairy, baked goods, and other FMCG products.
Investment
Funding from Inflection Point Ventures
Now, as the demand for home delivery of essentials grows, Milkbasket is raising $5.5 million in a Series-B round led by Inflection Point Ventures along with participation from existing investors Blume Ventures, Kalaari Capital, Mayfield India, Unilever Ventures and BeeNext. The investment takes the total funds raised by the company to $38 million, according to a report in The Economic Times.
Profitability
'Last fund-raise before profitability'
Speaking on the investment, Goel said that this is the company's last fund-raise on its path to profitability in 2020. "Our Gurugram, Noida, and Bengaluru operations are already breaking even with other cities on an accelerated track," he said, adding that "These funds will provide a further boost in our efforts to achieve the same and necessary buffers to deal with any eventualities."
Quote
Inflection Point CEO Vinay Bansal's comments on their investment
"Milkbasket enjoys a very high degree of loyalty from its customers. Milkbasket has a very lean delivery model using the milk-run concept that enables them to run a very efficient and cost-effective supply chain. This will help them become profitable very soon."
Players
Other players in grocery delivery category
Along with Milkbasket, BigBasket, Grofers, Amazon, Flipkart, and JioMart are competing in the grocery delivery category. And, these are just the mainstream players; several other businesses have also ventured into groceries, including food-tech players Zomato and Swiggy, e-pharmacy NetMeds, and ride-hailing giant Uber. Forrester Research estimates e-grocery players could make $3 billion in sales this year, as compared to $1.7 billion last year.