Hyperlocal delivery service Grofers is raising yet another round. In a confirmation already sent to us earlier this November, Grofers had confirmed raising of $120 million in a a Series C round of funding, led by Japan’s SoftBank along with the participation of Yuri Milner, Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital and Apoletto Managers. The money was raised at a valuation slightly less than $400 million.
This is the third investment round for the company in this year. Earlier, the company had raised $35 million in April. Prior to that, the company had raised $10 million in Series A round in February.
As per a person aware of the development, SoftBank is expected to take around 20 percent to 30 percent stake in the company. This news about the investment in a hyperlocal service, comes at a time when investors are restraining from making big bets in the segment. Softbank specially, has already made clear its intentions of restraining from making any big bets.
Grofers was founded in 2013 by Saurabh Kumar and Albinder Dhindsa. The Delhi-NCR based company offers on-demand, hyper-local logistics services that helps local businesses in India make dependable and trackable deliveries to their customers.
The company is currently operational in 25 cities and claims to get about 30,000 orders in a day. As per the company, it has employed a delivery crew of more than 4,000 people that is growing rapidly.
Albinder Dhindsa, co-founder of the company, said,
We are happy to welcome SoftBank on board as a partner as we try to build a marketplace for consumable products. Grofers currently supports over 10,000 small merchants in selling locally and we hope that with the additional capital, we will be able to invest in building this ecosystem further.
Hyperlocal delivery startups are attracting a lot of interest from the investors, and not only in India but globally. With the likes of Instacart and Grofers getting significant amount of funding, the established e-commerce players are also piloting similar services.
Amazon launched its Kirana Now in Bangalore while Flipkart launched a service called Nearby in Bangalore. But, Snapdeal opted for a different route and picked up a stake in PepperTap.
Grofers is one of the fastest growing and well-funded hyperlocal delivery startups from India. In order to stay at the top of the game, it acquired a few startups, which includes My Green Box and Townrush. The company competes with PepperTap, BigBasket, TinyOwl, etc, two of which are already struggling
