Matrix Partners India Backs Micro-Delivery Startup DailyNinja

Bengaluru-based milk and grocery delivery startup DailyNinja has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Mumbai-based venture capital firm Matrix Partners India.

Existing investors including Bengaluru-based Sequoia India and Saama Capital also participated in this funding round.

Founded in 2015 by Sagar Yarnalkar and Anurag Gupta, DailyNinja works on a subscription-based model in partnership with milkmen, milk brands, and B2B grocery distributors to digitise the entire supply chain for dairy products.

This development comes in a few months after the startup raised $3 Mn from Saama Capital and Sequoia Capital in June 2018.

Till date, DailyNinja has raised a total of $4.5M in funding over five rounds and notes well-known angel investors such as Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon of Freecharge, Aprameya Radhakrishna of TaxiForSure, Anupam Mittal of Shaaid.com and others among its backers.

The startup will use the fresh funds for strengthening DailyNinja’s market leadership in the daily essentials space, by expanding to other cities beyond Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai.

DailyNinja Co-founder Anurag Gupta stated, “These are exciting times for our segment. We will continue to focus on our expansion strategy across multiple cities. We will also be hiring aggressively”.

Daily Ninja: Key Milestones Achieved

Daily Ninja is currently delivering more than 30K orders per day across Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai. In August, the startup acquired Hyderabad-based hyperlocal delivery startup 4amShop in an all-cash deal.

According to a Goldman Sachs report, the Indian online grocery market is estimated to reach $40 Mn (INR 270 Cr) by FY19, growing at a CAGR of 62% from 2016 to 2022. Overall, IBEF’s 2018 report estimates food and grocery segment to account for 66% of the total revenues in the retail sector by 2020.

A major chumk of demand in this market is still catered by near by mom and popo shops as well as kirana stores. In presence of biggies like BigBasket, Grofers, Flipkart Supermart, the micro- delivery players like DailyNinja, Milkbasket, Doodhwala, Town Essentials and RainCan among others are leveraging their infrastructure to deliver small ticket-size items on a daily basis.

Even, Kishore Biyani’s Future Group is also looking to start delivering milk, eggs, and bread by launching 1,000 outlets under the Easyday, Nilgiris, and Heritage brands, in order to cash upon this highly untapped opportunity. For players with scale like Future Group, it can prove to be a massive expansion of their O2O retail model to the Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.

Most recently, Bengaluru-based online grocery company Avenue11 also raised $3.59 Mn (INR 26 Cr) from Brand Capital, the strategic investment arm of the Times Group. Going forward Avenue11’s strategy is to soon establish a unique O2O (Online-to-offline) model –where online orders are serviced by offline partner stores, thereby halving the cost of logistics.

DailyNinja is now working towards touching 100k deliveries a day over the next 12 months by leveraging its home distribution model.

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