Grofers raises Rs 400 crore in E-funding round led by SoftBank Group

In a fresh funding round led by Softbank Group, online grocery delivery company Grofers has raised Rs 400 crore and saw participation from Tiger Global and Apoletto Asia. Grofers is headquartered in Gurgaon and has now cumulatively raised $226.5 million with this latest Series E funding round, a press release from the company said. Grofers, founded by Saurabh Kumar and Albinder Dhindsa in 2013, has previously raised $166.5 million from investors like SoftBank, Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global.

Grofers is planning to invest in building private labels and supply chain improvements. A significant amount of investment will go towards building infrastructure and technology and efficient supply chain management to achieve deeper penetration in the cities where it has its presence.

Grofers CEO and co-founder Albinder Dhindsa said, “This fresh round by our existing investors is a vote of confidence and trust in the turnaround at Grofers. We took some hard decisions to fix parts of the business that were not scaling well. Our efforts have clearly contributed in making sure we have a clear path to profitability as well as the largest market share in the online grocery segment; having grown four-fold in the last one year for monthly sales in excess of `100 crore.”

Also Read: SpiceJet aircraft hits runway lights at Bengaluru International Airport

Grofers claimed that it currently clocks an average of 25,000 orders a day with an order value of `1,400 and turned operationally profitable in Delhi-NCR on a per-order basis. According to Grofers, the online grocery market in India is expected to touch $1 billion by this year compared with $600 million in 2016.

The online grocery delivery market in India has started to witness increased competition with other leading player BigBasket having raised funding to the tune of $300 million led by China’s Alibaba. Besides these players, the leading horizontal marketplaces like Amazon and Flipkart are also making a strong foray into the online grocery delivery space.

Also Read: India's October-December current account deficit widens sharply