Online grocery start-up Grofers has drawn up a ₹280-crore plan to expand its warehousing capacity within the next 18 months to meet its growth needs, said a top official.

“Currently, we have a storage capacity of 2.1 million sq.ft.,” said Albinder Dhindsa, co-founder and CEO, Grofers. “This would be increased to 2.5 million sq.ft. by December 2019 and to 3.5 million sq.ft. by December 2020,” he said.

Grofers has 25 warehouses in 10 cities. It plans to add seven more warehouses by December 2019. The expansion would cost about ₹80 crore for the first phase and ₹200 crore for the second phase. The new warehouses would come up in Chennai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad.

On funding, he said the firm had recently raised ₹1,400 crore. Most of it would be deployed in infrastructure development.

Mr. Dhindsa hinted that the company planned to go for initial public offering (IPO) by 2021. Prior to that, it might raise funds from existing investors once again. Till now, the firm had raised ₹350 million.

Asserting that it was planning to reduce the number of stock keeping units (SKUs) from 1,800 to 1,400 to maintain a healthy growth, he said: “We have been growing at 10% to 15% month-on-month and our prices are lower than others by 12% to 15%. We don’t deal in fruits, vegetables and dairy items.”