Udaan, a business-to-business (B2B) commerce platform, founded by former executives of Flipkart, has today announced that it has raised $10 million in its latest funding round. The round was led by Lightspeed Ventures. While Udaan didn’t reveal the valuation at which the company raised funding, two sources aware of the matter told ET that the company has been valued at $40 million.
Bejul Somaia, who is a partner at the VC firm, will now be joining the board of Udaan. He said that it is a rare and exciting opportunity to back an experienced team of founders like Sujeet, Amod, and Vaibhav, who had worked at Flipkart for several years.
The founders of Udaan — Vaibhav Gupta, Amod Malviya, and Sujeet Kumar – left Flipkart in 2016 to set up this venture. While Sujeet Kumar led WS Retail Pvt. Ltd., Amod was the CTO of Flipkart and Vaibhav was a Senior VP. The company is currently in beta, and will soon launch in India. The company hasn’t yet revealed a timeframe for the launch.
As per a report, the three founders of the company have also invested around $1.5 million in the startup as a part of its seed funding round. Sujeet confirmed the seed funding but did not reveal the valuation.
Udaan has already hired a cohort of more than 20 people, half of whom have been picked from Flipkart to form a core team. The company is initially focusing on products in electronics and apparel category.
The deal, which is one of the largest early stage funding round this year, underlines the growing interest in the B2B e-commerce segment. Global giants including Amazon and Alibaba have also invested in their B2B commerce operations in India this year.
India’s B2B e-commerce market potential was valued at $300 billion in 2014, and expected to reach $700 billion by 2020, according to a report by the Confederation of Indian Industry and Deloitte.
According to industry estimates, B2B e-commerce is a $500 billion market in its early stages in India. A report by Frost & Sullivan suggests that by 2020, the B2B e-commerce market will be worth $12 trillion, making B2B e-commerce almost thrice as big as the B2C market.
