B2B Food And Grocery Marketplace Jumbotail Raises $85 Mn In Series C Funding

B2B food and grocery marketplace Jumbotail has raised $85 Mn in a Series C funding round led by Artal Asia, an affiliate of global equity investment firm Invus. Ajax Capital also participated in the round that gave partial exits to early investors Nexus Venture Partners and Kalaari Capital.

Founded in 2015 by S Karthik Venkateswaran and Ashish Jhina, Jumbotail runs an online B2B marketplace for food and groceries primarily catering to wholesale buyers. It sells dietary staples, spices, dry fruits, packaged foods and FMCG products to traders. 

According to the startup, it connects more than 2000 FMCG and other brands and sellers with more than 150,000 kirana stores across 38 cities and towns in India through its platform, with the help of its warehousing and logistics infrastructure.

Jumbotail said it is going to use the freshly-infused capital to triple its engineering, product, design, data science, category management, marketing, and finance teams to scale across 100 cities and towns in India.

Jumbotail also helps transform kirana stores into modern omni-channel convenience stores under its J24 brand—a process that happens in under 48 hours according to the startup’s claims. This includes digitising in-store operations, inventory management, real-time data and merchandising insights as well as an online B2C store among other features.

“Our evergreen structure enables us to partner for the long term with companies who seek to transform their industries, and we are thrilled to embark on such a partnership with Jumbotail, which is rapidly emerging as an industry-defining company in B2B ecommerce. We share Ashish and Karthik’s visions of digitising kirana stores to transform India’s food and grocery retail landscape at scale,” said Francis Cukierman, managing director of Invus Asia. 

Cukierman will be joining Jumbotail’s board of directors along with Benjamin Felt, who is the managing director of Invus US. 

According to Inc42 Plus, India’s retail market is poised to reach $1.7 Tn by 2026 growing at a CAGR of 7.8% during the period. Driven by the rise in digital infrastructure, ecommerce is expected to capture 11.4% of the total retail market by 2026, to become a $200 Bn market by 2026.

“We nearly quadrupled our scale in 2021 and are looking to further accelerate our growth trajectory in the coming year. We will continue to invest aggressively to make Jumbotail the pre-eminent destination for food and grocery brands to reach the overwhelming majority of India’s consumers through our pan-India network of kirana partners,”said  Ashish Jhina, cofounder and CEO of Jumbotail. 

Yesterday, Gurugram-based B2B marketplace OfBusiness raised $325 Mn in its Series G funding round led by Alpha Wave Ventures II, Tiger Global Management and Softbank Vision Fund 2.

Earlier this year, Industrial B2B marketplace Moglix joined the unicorn club after raising $120 Mn at a valuation of $1 Bn.