Bengaluru-based grocery delivery startup Milkbasket said Monday it has raised USD 5.5 million in a Series B round led by Inflection Point Ventures. Existing investors Blume Ventures, Kalaari Capital, Mayfield India, Unilever Ventures, and Beenext also participated in the funding round.
The latest funding has brought the five-year-old startup’s total investment to USD 38 million to date.
“This is probably our last fundraise on our path to profitability – that we target to achieve in 2020,” Milkbasket co-founder and CEO Anant Goel said in a statement, according to news agency PTI.
The company claimed that its operations across Gurgaon, Noida, and Bengaluru are already breaking even, while “other cities [are] on an accelerated track.”
The fresh funds, he said, will provide “a further boost in our efforts to achieve the same and necessary buffers to deal with any eventualities”.
Founded by Anant Goel, Ashish Goel, Anurag Jain, and Yatish Talvadia in 2015, the startup lists over 9,000 products including fruits and vegetables, dairy, bakery, and other FMCG products. The company claimed it caters to over 130,000 households in seven locations including Gurgaon, Noida, Dwarka, Ghaziabad, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru.
Started in 2017, Inflection Point Ventures has been writing cheques for early-to-mid stage startups in high potential sectors like health tech, delivery, edtech, and telemedicine.
Vinay Bansal, founder and CEO of Inflection Point Ventures believes that Milkbasket’s lean delivery model enables them to run a very efficient and cost-effective supply chain. “This will help them become profitable very soon and first among the various competitive players in the market,” he said in a statement.
Milkbasket is one of the upcoming startups in India’s soon-to-be USD 10.5 billion e-grocery-market. The healthcare pandemic that forced India to go under lockdown during the months of April and May, has brought the niche sector into the limelight. Apart from Bigbasket and Grofers, companies like Amazon, Flipkart, Dunzo, and Swiggy, have sharpened their focus on e-groceries over the last few months, making the segment more competitive than ever before.
“Their understanding and application of technology which helps them execute single-day deliveries and even accept orders till midnight gives them an edge over other players operating in the same category,” Bansal said.