Grocery delivery platform Milkbasket is announcing a fresh $5.5Mn round led by Inflection Point Ventures, along with participation from existing backers. These include Blume Ventures, Kalaari Capital, Mayfield India, Unilever Ventures and BeeNext.
MilkBasket, despite serving a substantially large consumer base, has raised less than a fraction of external capital than what other peers have raised. And that has been primarily because of company’s sustainable business model and control over the entire end-to-end supply chain. With that initial success and a gap that became prominent during COVID-19 lockdowns, the startups has now decided to further expand and hence the fundraise.
In fact, the model has been so successful, that the company expects to turn profitable by the end of this year. Anant Goel, Co-Founder and CEO, Milkbasket says, “This is probably our last fund raise on our path to profitability – that we target to achieve in 2020. Our Gurgaon, Noida and Bangalore operations are already breaking even with other cities on an accelerated track. These funds will provide a further boost in our efforts to achieve the same and necessary buffers to deal with any eventualities.”
The company claims to have successfully delivered over 30 Million orders till date, backed by advanced tech across the full-stack supply chain from sourcing to last-mile delivery. The company claims to be serving 130K households across Gurgaon, Noida, Dwarka, Ghaziabad, Hyderabad and Bangalore. The platform now offers over 9000 products across fruits & vegetables, dairy, bakery and all other FMCG categories.
In terms of COVID-19 specific measures, the company has rolled out several customised offerings, keeping in mind strict and varied level of lockdowns. MilkBasket launched services like MbBulk and SCO (Senior Citizens Only) Helpline across multiple cities to help people sustain the lockdown without venturing out for groceries. Senior citizen grocery helpline was launched to help the elderly who didn’t have their sons and daughters with them and were in particularly at risk due to the outbreak. Milkbasket staff wears masks and gloves at all times and undergoes daily symptom assessment tests.
Inflection Point Ventures has surprisingly been among one of the more active startup investors in an otherwise dull fundraising scenario. The firm recently also invested in edtech company Edvizo, with a $150K seed round. he Angel Platform, started in 2018, has been investing in startups across high potential sectors like health tech, delivery, ed tech and telemedicine at ‘rational’ valuations.
