Grocery Startup Bigbasket Raises $8.02 Mn Funding To Take On Grofers

SUMMARY

This Comes Just A Few Days After Grofers Secured $14.7 Mn From Its Parent Company

In a bid to compete efficiently with Grofers, online marketplace grocery delivery, the inventory-led firm BigBasket has raised $8.02 Mn (INR 52 Cr) in funding from four of its existing investors. Investors who participated in this round of funding include Abraaj Basket, Bessemer Venture Partners along with International Finance Corp and Sands Capital.

The current funding raised by Bigbasket follows its previous funding of $5.8 Mn which was raised few days ago in two tranches from Helion Ventures and Trifecta Venture.

The development comes at a time when Grofers last month filled up its bucket with $14.7 Mn funding (INR 96 Cr) from its parents company Grofers International based in Singapore.

Considering the previous reports of failed attempts of a merger with Amazon for grocery delivery service, the funding may help in scaling-up company’s operations across verticals while competing with Amazon which is presently strategising to expand across newer cities pan India.

In order to scale-up the operations significantly over the coming years, Bigbasket is also getting involved in B2B business by offering wide range of services from its B2B segment such as meats, private labels, staples and gourmet items to various top hotels, restaurants and caterers.

As per the reports, the online grocery giant Bigbasket while striving to competing with Amazon is also engaged to be in constant talks with Alibaba backed Paytm Mall for investments.

Hyperlocal has been a tough cookie to crack. The sector saw the unfortunate end of Peppertap. Meanwhile, Bigbasket consistently struggles to boost trade after bearing the losses of $43 Mn on revenue of $89.5 Mn in the year ended March 2016.

While facing a robust market competition, Bigbasket also realises a bigger long-term challenging climate of investment which seriously hampers the success of such ecommerce startup businesses as the online grocery platforms contributes only about $300 Mn, according to a report by a research backed consulting firm Technopak.

(The development was reported by Financial Express)