Lightspeed backs $50m Series B for India’s Udaan

Udaan was founded by Vaibhav Gupta, Amod Malviya and Sujeet Kumar, all former executives of Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart, with a view to providing an online marketplace to small and medium-sized corporate clients in a range of consumer-facing sectors. The service is said to facilitate physical product deliveries to more than 500 cities and is expected to use the fresh capital for further expansion.

“We continue to be big believers in the team and market opportunity, and the company’s performance in terms of scale, growth dynamics, buyer-seller retention and frequency benchmarks to the best marketplace platforms we’ve seen globally,” Bejul Somaia, managing director at Lightspeed India, said, according to Livemint.

The investment is broadly seen as an endorsement of business growth potential in India’s fragmented logistics space. Private equity activity in the country has aimed to create value by modernizing domestic warehousing, trucking and last-mile delivery services as they integrate with more professional international supply chains.

Udaan expansion ambitions are expected to benefit from India’s recently reformed goods and services tax (GST) regime, which is seen as reducing barriers to interstate logistics. The company has also indicated that increased internet connectivity in the country will support customer confidence in the e-commerce businesses that it supports.

Lightspeed has offices in the US, India, Israel, and China. It closed its first India-focused fund at the hard-cap of $135 million in 2015. The vehicle, which had initially targeted a corpus of $100 million, is focused on early-stage investment in various IT segments. 

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Early-stage
• Support services
• Technology
• India
• Lightspeed Venture Partners
• Logistics
• TMT