Udaan’s Valuation Drops By Nearly 50% To $1.8 Bn In Down Round

Business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce unicorn Udaan’s valuation has dropped by nearly half to around $1.8 Bn in a down round, as per ET’s report.

The Bengaluru-based startup was last valued at $3.2 Bn following a funding round in January 2021.

A down round is a funding round in which a company raises capital at a lower valuation than it had in a previous round. 

In December last year, Udaan raised $340 Mn in its Series E funding round led by UK-based savings and investment firm M&G Prudential, with participation from existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and DST Global.

The round included a mix of fresh equity investment and the conversion of existing debt (convertible notes) into equity. 

Founded by Vaibhav Gupta, Sujeet Kumar and Amod Malviya, Udaan enables supply chain and logistics operations focused on B2B trade. It claims to enable daily delivery across over 1,000 cities and 12,500 pin codes through udaanExpress. It counts the likes of Lightspeed, Microsoft and Tencent among its backers. 

Udaan fired close to 120 employees, just within a week after raising $340 Mn in its Series E funding round.

“We have already made significant progress in our journey towards building a profitable business and continue to make relevant interventions to our already proven business model, while remaining customer-centric and agile. However, these interventions have also resulted in some redundancies in the system,” the spokesperson said.

As per the ET report, Udaan’s CEO, Vaibhav Gupta, has reportedly emphasised the primary focus on cost reduction each quarter. The team is said to be working quarterly to align with this directive. Udaan has allegedly established specific operational targets and communicated to investors its objective of achieving operational profitability within the next two quarters.

However, Udaan is not the only unicorn to face devaluation lately. US-based asset manager BlackRock once again slashed its valuation of edtech major BYJU’S, this time around 95% from $22 Bn to $1 Bn.