BigBasket Close To Acquiring Milkbasket, DailyNinja To Dominate Daily Deliveries

Bengaluru-headquartered grocery delivery platform BigBasket is in advanced talks to acquire two milk delivery startups — Gurugram-based Milkbasket and Bengaluru-based DailyNinja to consolidate its position in the grocery and subscription delivery space.

An ET report, citing sources, said that both these startups are running low on cash and the deal would be majority stock acquisitions. Moreover, Bigbasket’s valuation is also expected to stand much higher, for this deal, than the $1.2 Bn which is achieved during the last round of funding last year.

On the other hand, Milkbasket’s valuation for the deal is going to be less than $15 Mn. Prior to coming to BigBasket, Milkbasket was also in talks with Swiggy, Amazon India, and Dunzo. It must be noted that neither deal has been finalised yet.

Will BigBasket Emerge As The Leader?

Founded in 2015 by Anant Goel, Ashish Goel, Anurag Jain, and Yatish Talvadia, Milkbasket works on a subscription-based model to delivers daily essentials like milk, vegetables, beverages, cleaning accessories and dairy products early in the morning. Recently, the startup had launched the delivery of fresh meat as well.

Sagar Yarnalkar and Anurag Gupta founded DailyNinja is also a subscription-based platform, which provides early morning delivery of everyday essentials. The company is backed by venture capital firms such as Matrix Partners India, Saama Capital and Sequoia Capital.

The report added while Milkbasket’s deal is under discussion right now, DailyNinja’s acquisition is close to completion. Some DailyNinja teams are also working from BigBasket’s premises. After the complete acquisition, DailyNinja is expected to be merged with BigBasket’s BBDaily platform which also delivers milk, fruits, and vegetables. DailyNinja’s founders will join BigBasket, the report added.

On average, Milkbasket clocks around 40K-50K deliveries per day. Most of these orders come from Delhi-NCR, Bengaluru and Hyderabad. While DailyNinja is also delivering close to 1 Lakh orders per day, BBDaily is expected to be clocking an average of 1.4 lakh orders daily.

After the acquisition of Milkbasket and DailyNinja, BBDaily will increase the number of daily deliveries by around 3 Lakh. With this, BigBasket will take a clear lead in this segment against its competitors including new entrants such as Reliance Jio. As of now, BigBasket faces a direct competition against Softbank-backed Grofers. Other players in the space include Walmart-owned Flipkart, Amazon, and NatureBasket as well as JioMart.

Previously, milk delivery startups have either shut down their operations or have sold themselves to other companies. For instance, while Supr Daily was sold off to Swiggy in July 2019, Doodhwala had shut down its operations in October last year.