Bangalore-based DailyNinja, a hyperlocal mobile solution for all subscription based daily needs has raised an undisclosed amount in a Pre-Series A round of funding led by Venk Krishnan (NuVentures). Krishnan is an existing investor from its previous round.
Other key investors in the round include, Aprameya Radhakrishna (Founder of TaxiForSure), Anupam Mittal (shaadi.com and People Group), Kunal Shah of Freecharge, Tracxn Labs, Subramanya SV (ex-Partner BVP), Ravi Garkipati (EIR and SVP at Flipkart) apart from several other Indian and Singapore based investors. The round was raised using the LetsVenture platform and TracxnSyndicate.
Neha Singh, co-founder of Tracxn said “The team is solving the challenges that exist in the supply of daily consumer essentials by leveraging the network of existing low-cost operators making it scalable and profitable at the same time. In addition, the company has a strong team with the execution capabilities to scale this model efficiently”.
DailyNinja was founded by BITS Pilani graduates Sagar Yarnalkar and Anurag Gupta in June 2015. Both of them are serial entrepreneurs and were previously co-founders at Appspire technologies, a Mumbai-based mobile services company.
It allows users to subscribe for daily needs such as milk, bread, eggs, curd, dosa batter, paneer and water cans, etc. It is currently present in Bangalore and claims to be fulfilling more than 6000 orders per day.
The startup will use the newly raised funds primarily to upgrade operations and expand the customer base.
“While there may be hype about hyperlocal delivery startups failing, Daily Ninja seems to have got its fundamentals right,” said Radhakrishna. “They are using the existing supply chain of milk vendors, who anyway knock on doors every day, and it also caters to customers efficiently through its subscription model. The company has grown substantially from the last round of investment which I was also a part of.”
Talking about what differentiates DailyNinja from its competition, founder Sagar said, “Our model is unique. We build upon dense customer bases by focusing on certain pockets of the city ensuring high efficiency in our delivery process. Our current cost per delivery is Rs.3 which will cut down to half as we grow. Scheduled deliveries in morning also help us move fast and avoid traffic while having 100% fulfilment. Subscription based daily deliveries ensure we reach your home everyday, thus implying that returns can be easily picked up the next day at no cost. As our model has the backbone of subscriptions, we have next to zero churn and unbelievable user engagement statistics. A customer opens the app 4 times a week on an average mostly leading to transactions.”
Home delivery of household essentials is a complex business, with low margins and high delivery costs involved. Much of the customers requirements are recurring and subscription based. It is a high volume game which requires an asset light approach and optimisation through technology wherever possible. Many companies in similar sectors are struggling due to excessive delivery and maintenance costs, on the other hand DailyNinja has shown scale, hand in hand with sensible economics.
Prior to this, in September 2015, DailyNinja raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding. Other players in the segment of hyperlocal marketplace include Grofers, Bigbasket, Shadowfax, Pickingo, Peppertap and even players like Amazon, Snapdeal, and Flipkart, etc.
