Online home essentials and grocery delivery startup Milkbasket is expecting to break even in the ongoing quarter, as e-commerce adoption in the country sees a huge boost triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic.
"We are very much on track to achieve overall profitability (by September-end) while we had turned operationally profitable in April," said Anant Goel, co-founder and CEO of the Gurugram-based firm. "In December when started focusing on profitability, only Gurugram had turned profitable by then. Our focus was to make one city profitable in every quarter," he said.
Milkbasket is present in four cities so far including Gurugram, Noida, Bengaluru and Hyderabad. Goel said, the company had achieved break-even in three cities and Hyderabad would join the list soon.
"We will probably be the first player in the online grocery space to achieve profitability in India. No other company has been able to do that because of the perception that it is achievable only after achieving a bigger scale," Goel said.
Milkbasket has also witnessed a 2.2 to 2.5 times increase in its average order value across its 130,000 active user base while it has been onboarding 500-1,000 new signups on a daily basis since the lockdown.
This comes at a time when the pandemic has given a fillip to e-commerce firms with more consumers shifting to ordering groceries online. According to Forrester Research, India’s online grocery market could hit $3 billion in sales this year, an increase of 76 per cent over the previous year.
Earlier this week, the company announced raising $5.5 million in Series B funding, led by Inflection Point Ventures. The funding will be used for hiring more people and up-gradation of technology, the company said. According to data compiled by Crunchbase, the startup has raised $38.8 million till date.
Milkbasket, however, said it was still facing manpower shortage problems and employee costs had been inching higher due to the prolonged supply issue. "Training of fresh talent and former gig-workers laid off by hyperlocal startups has been taking time," Goel said.
Goel also downplayed news reports which suggested that Milkbasket was an acquisition target for Amazon, Big Basket and Paytm Mall. "Our investors have started saying, Milkbasket is like the girl everyone wants to marry, but nobody is able to date," Goel said.