Micro Delivery Startup DailyNinja Raises $3 Mn Funding From Saama, Sequoia Capital

Bengaluru-based hyperlocal subscription-based delivery startup DailyNinja has raised $3 Mn from Saama Capital and existing investor Sequoia Capital.

With the latest funding, the startup plans to expand its business by acquiring more customers across Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Gurugram. The funds will also be used to upgrade customer experience by adding more offerings for their customers.

Commenting on the development, Anurag Gupta, co-founder of DailyNinja, said, “This round will help us achieve our objective of reaching to 100k deliveries a day over the next 12 months. Our focus will continue to be on the scale while ensuring a better experience for our customers, we plan to bring DailyNinja to Hyderabad and Gurugram soon.”

Founded in 2015 by Sagar Yarnalkar and Anurag Gupta, DailyNinja provides early morning delivery everyday essentials and delivers Milk and Groceries to 25,000 households every day across the Bengaluru and Hyderabad.

On the investment, Ash Lilani, Partner at Saama Capital said, “We have been impressed by the way Sagar and Anurag have built significant traction in a very capital efficient manner and with a sound growth strategy. We believe the time is ripe for a rapid acceleration in this segment and we believe this is the right team who can execute and scale.”

With last round of $1.5 Mn VC funding in October 2017 from Sequoia Capital, DailyNinja has raised $4.5 Mn funds till date from well-known angel investors Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon of Freecharge, Aprameya Radhakrishna of TaxiForSure, Anupam Mittal of Shaaid.com and others.

Shailesh Lakhani, Partner at Sequoia Capital added, “The DailyNinja team has executed well to build an efficient at home distribution model that we believe has broad applicability. Sequoia India is excited to continue to partner with them and to help them build a much larger footprint over the coming years.”

Micro Delivery In India

In the micro delivery segment offering fresh and dairy products, DailyNinja competes with the likes of Milkbasket, Doodhwala, Town Essentials and RainCan.

On a higher scale in the online grocery market, we have major players like Amazon India, Flipkart, BigBasket among others. These startups mostly offer a slew of other products too and continue to work in diverse segments.

According to a report by RedSeer Consulting, the Indian online grocery market stood at $1 Bn in 2017. A Goldman Sachs report estimates that the Indian online grocery market will reach $40 Mn (INR 270 Cr) by FY19, growing at a CAGR of 62% from 2016 to 2022.

Morgan Stanley further expects the online food and grocery segment to become the fastest-growing segments in India, expanding at a CAGR of 141% by 2020 and contributing $15 Bn or 12.5% of overall online retail sales.

With players like Flipkart and Amazon entering the micro-delivery grocery space, startups like DailyNinja can make a fruitful use of funding and can deep dive into the market for the expansion and growth.