At the time when startups with hyperlocal added to their name/services are struggling to survive, a Gurgaon-based micro delivery startup Milkbasket has secured around $500,00 in pre-Series A round of funding led by EVC Ventures.
The round also saw participation from Zhu Dao Investments; Peter Zou, Partner of Beam Capital VC and CEO of YeahMobi; Vikas Banga and Manav Kamboj of Snapdeal.
With the new cash coming, the company will deploy fund towards hiring its core team and on enhancing its technology. The company claims to have figured out positive unit economics within just nine months of its operations.
Anant Goel, chief executive officer of Milkbasket, said,
We will use this fund to expand the core team, further enhance our technology and beef up the logistics. We are aiming for a 10x growth in customers in the next four to five months and increase per customer spend by 2.5 to three times during this time.
Founded in 2015 by Anant Goel, Ashish Goel, Anurag Jain and Yatish Talvadia, Milkbasket offers micro-delivery service fulfilling daily grocery and household needs of customers every morning, with a unique 100% in-house last mile logistics solution.
It is currently serving across 15 clusters in Gurgaon, each cluster with a user base of around 500. Starting with only milk delivery, the company currently offers over 3,000 products through a hybrid inventory model.
Over coming six months, the company aims to grow to a 250 strong organization with 80% workforce in logistics and serving over 15,000 orders a day across 100+ clusters in Gurgaon.
It is not in a hurry to branch out its operations to other cities in India. Instead, the company is planning to get hold of the city it is currently operating in – Gurgaon. This could very well be a lesson learnt from the fate of other heavily backed upstarts like Grofers, Peppertap and others, who pursued rapid, aggressive expansion and ultimately had to either partially or completely shut down.
It is interesting to see that investors still have faith in grocery delivery startups and are investing in such startups when almost none of such startups has been able to provide expected outcome and is difficult to achieving positive unit economics due to high cash burn rate.
Earlier, PepperTap – India’s third largest grocery delivery startup by the amount of capital raised — $51 Million in various funding rounds to be precise — decided to close its operations and pivot to logistics business.
