Jumbotail Raises $8.5 Mn From Kalaari Capital, Nexus Venture Partners

Food and grocery wholesale marketplace Jumbotail has raised $8.5 Mn Series A funding from Kalaari Capital and Nexus Venture Partners. As per a company statement, Nexus had previously invested $2 Mn in Jumbotail.

Bala Srinivasa, Partner, Kalaari Capital said, “98% of India’s food and grocery consumption is via kirana stores. Jumbotail brings tech-centric innovation to address massive inefficiencies in terms of product discovery, distribution costs, stock outs, and pricing.  We are excited by their ability to eliminate information asymmetry, aggregate previously unavailable demand and supply data, and significantly improve economic outcomes for manufacturers, brands, financial institutions and kirana owners.”

Jumbotail was founded in Nov 2015 by Stanford alumni S. Karthik Venkateswaran and Ashish Jhina. It is an online wholesale marketplace for food and grocery. Jumbotail serves wholesale customers such as kirana stores and HoReCa (hotel, restaurant and cafe) businesses in Bengaluru.

Ashish Jhina, co-founder & COO, Jumbotail, said, “Manufacturers and brands can instantly get direct and highly targeted access to thousands of retailers and institutional customers through the Jumbotail platform without needing to invest in expensive physical distribution networks. Jumbotail also opens up the kirana network to financial institutions looking to extend credit in a cost-effective and scalable manner.”

The company plans to utilise the funds for building technologies and enhance operational capabilities.

Jumbotail aims to organise the food and grocery ecosystem using technology, data science, and design. The startup offers a wide selection of products including staples, spices, dry fruits, packaged foods, and FMCG products. Sellers (traders, manufacturers and brands) have an option to list their food, grocery and FMCG products on its marketplace. The marketplace is accessible to customers through a mobile app available in four languages – Kannada, Malayalam, Hindi, and English.

Karthik Venkateswaran, co-founder & CEO said, “While this is a multi-billion-dollar market opportunity, it requires us to solve challenging problems that are so unique to India that copycat models will not work. We are putting our customers first and building technologies and supply chains that will work for the next billion Indians in distributed, chaotic and unstructured environment.”

The services provided by Jumbotail include storefront delivery and payments collection for its sellers. Apart from this, the startup provides working capital credit from third-party credit providers to sellers.

The Indian online grocery market is estimated to reach $40 Mn (INR 270 Cr) by FY ‘19 growing at a CAGR of 62% from 2016 to 2022. As per reports, India’s B2B ecommerce industry is poised to grow to $700 Bn by 2020. In June 2017, MaxWholesale, a mobile-based B2B grocery supply chain raised $1 Mn in Pre-Series A round of funding led by Indian Angel Network (IAN) and Maple Capital Advisors. Apart from Jumbotail, other players in the grocery segment include StockIn, BigBasket, and ZopNow among others.