Hyperlocal Delivery Startups Gain Momentum, After ZopNow & Grofers, PepperTap Raises $10 Mn

Hyperlocal delivery segment in India is the one which has been witnessing a lot of activities taking place, be it funding acquisitions and even cropping up of new players.

Just two days back Bangalore-based grocery startup ZopNow which had changed its model to become a hyperlocal delivery startup had announced that it has raised over $10 Mn funding, today another startup dealing in this space has raised $10 Mn.

Gurgaon-based, mobile-first hyperlocal grocery delivery services startup, PepperTap has received Series A funding of $10 Mn from SAIF Partners and Sequoia Capital. This round for PepperTap comes just few weeks after it had raised seed funding from Sequoia. The 5 month old startup plans to use the funds raised for building a highly-skilled team that is in sync with global standards and for expanding the reach of PepperTap to 10 more cities in the country by the end of the year.

Launched in November 2014, PepperTap offers more than 15,000 SKUs across categories including Staples, food & dairy products, household items, fresh fruits & vegetables etc. Consumers can place their orders through a mobile app and the startup claims to deliver products in a span of two hours.

PepperTap app is presently available on Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS platforms.

Navneet Singh, Co-founder, PepperTap commented, “This investment will help us iron out any chinks in our armor, and build on our strengths to take our business from a single-city operation to a pan-India scale.”

Navneet Singh an IIM-Ahmedabad alumni, has an extensive experience in verticals like financial services, transportation & logistics industries. Prior to PepperTap, Navneet established ecommerce focused reverse logistics company, NuvoEx. He also played a key role in acquisition of GharPay at Delhivery.

Ravi Adusumalli, Managing Director, SAIF Partners said “Grocery in India is a huge market and grocery shopping on mobile is already seeing strong adoption. We believe that PepperTap’s hyperlocal marketplace approach is the most efficient way to cater to this market, and can scale very rapidly. We are very excited to partner with Navneet in making PepperTap a big success.”

ZopNow which use to operate like other grocery startups like BigBasket changed its model to hyperlocal delivery as this was less capital-intensive and much more scalable model in comparison to the inventory based model. As the grocery products being perishable in nature requires proper facilities for preservation etc. Thus by just being into delivery gives much more incentives.

To be noted, just yesterday, another hyper local delivery startup Grofers which started out with grocery and later expanded to other categories had raised over $35 Mn in new funding from Tiger & Sequoia. Grofers had even acquired Delhi-based My Green Box, a smartphone-based grocery delivery platform, to give a boost to its grocery delivery service.

Interestingly, Amazon and Flipkart are too trying to leverage this space, Amazon launched KiranaNow and Flipkart is said to be launching grocery delivery later half this year.

Mumbai-based Scootsy, Swiggy and Delyver have recently raised funding or are close to raising funds.