Online grocery start-up Grofers has raised ₹400 crore in a fresh funding round led by SoftBank, the Japanese tech-to-finance conglomerate.
Other existing investors, including the U.S.-based Tiger Global and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner-backed fund Apoletto Asia have also participated in this round.
‘Building war chest’
The total funds raised by the Gurugram-based firm now stands at $226.5 million. The latest capital infusion is expected to help Grofers build its war chest in the battle against retail giant Amazon and Bengaluru-based online grocer bigbasket which, in February this year, raised $300 million in a funding round led by China’s Alibaba. “This fresh round by our existing investors is a vote of confidence and trust in the turnaround at Grofers,” said Albinder Dhindsa, co-founder and CEO of Grofers, in a statement. “We took some hard decisions to fix parts of the business that were not scaling well,” he said. Grofers would use the fresh funding from the series E round to invest in building private labels and in supply chain improvements.
The firm said a significant amount of investment will go towards building infrastructure and technology. It would also use the money to efficiently manage the supply chain to achieve deeper penetration in cities where it is already present.
‘Path to profitability’
An alumnus of IIT-Delhi, Mr. Dhindsa co-founded Grofers in 2013 along with IIT-Bombay alumnus Saurabh Kumar, who was also his colleague at Cambridge Systematics. “Our efforts have clearly contributed in making sure we have a clear path to profitability,” said Mr. Dhindsa.
Grofers said the overall online grocery market in India is expected to move up the curve and touch $1 billion by this year, compared with $600 million in 2016.
