Udaan, the business-to-business e-commerce start-up has raised $280 million in additional financing from its existing and new investors. The existing investors of Udaan - Lightspeed Venture Partners, DST Global, GGV Capital, Altimeter Capital, and Tencent – participated in the funding exercise, in addition to two new investors - Octahedron Capital and Moonstone Capital.
The investment takes the valuation of the Bengaluru-based company to over $3.1 billion from $2.8 billion when it raised $585 million from investors in October 2019, according to the sources.
The additional financing exercise takes the overall funding raised by Udaan to date to $ 1.15 billion.
The additional funds will be deployed towards continued market creation of b2b e-commerce in India. This includes reaching out to more and more small businesses across the country and bringing benefits of e-commerce to them. Some of the key areas of investment will be: continued expansion of selection of products and categories available on Udaan and furthering user experience. The firm would also enhance technology platform, expand SME financing capabilities and reinforce of the supply-chain infrastructure.
“Covid-19 has accelerated the already fast digital-led evolution of highly fragmented and unorganized Indian trade/ retail industry. While at the same time, the pandemic also highlighted the unique structure of Indian economy, with millions of kiranas and neighbourhood stores becoming the lifeline of our country at the time of crisis,” said Amod Malviya, co-founder, Udaan
“Udaan is at the forefront of this uniquely Indian e-commerce opportunity, emerging in the last 4 years as one of the largest e-commerce platforms in India while taking an India-first mobile-first approach to eCommerce. This financing enables us to further our journey of taking e-commerce to the depth and breadth of the country, with Udaan’s unique low-cost model for core middle India,” he said.
The Indian market has a large number of small and medium businesses across both manufacturing and trade, including millions of farmers, traders and retailers. Mobile technology is enabling access for these businesses at an unprecedented speed. It is creating a unique opportunity to leverage the internet to bring scale and professionalization to both supply and trading e-commerce, that is native-fit for the Indian market. Udaan’s marketplace has strategically focused on this trend, facilitating efficient and convenient transactions. It is enabling low and best price, highest quality and widest selection to its network of over 3 million users in 900 cities by connecting them to over 25,000 sellers across the country.
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