India's Milkbasket raises $5.5m Series B
Inflection Point Ventures has led an INR420 million ($5.5 million) Series B round for Indian grocery delivery startup Milkbasket.
Existing backers Blume Ventures, Kalaari Capital, Mayfield India, Unilever Ventures and BeeNext also participated. Other investors in the company include InnoVen Capital, Lenovo Capital & Incubator Group, and EVC Ventures, according to AVCJ Research.
Founded in 2015, Milkbasket is a subscription-based doorstep delivery service. It provides essential goods like fresh milk, bread, eggs, fruits, and vegetables, fulfiling orders made as late as midnight on the previous day. The company also offers a wholesale ordering option and has most recently launched delivery services targeting senior citizens.
Milkbasket says it has helped deliver more than 30 million goods and served more than 130,000 households in the country. The company operates in three cities and a further three townships and plans to use the new capital to expand into other metropolitan areas.
“Milkbasket has a very lean delivery model using the milk-run concept that 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,” said Vinay Bansal, founder of Inflection Point.
Other daily needs-focused delivery platforms in the country are Supr Daily, owned by India’s leading food delivery firm Swiggy, and DailyNinja, which was acquired earlier in the year by BigBasket, the country’s leading grocery delivery platform. BigBasket also runs its own service called bbdaily. Supr Daily is in seven cities and DailyNinja is in five.
Grofers, NinjaCart and Amazon also offer on-demand grocery delivery services. Zomato, India's second-largest food delivery platform, shuttered its grocery delivery service earlier in the month.
Inflection Point was founded in 2017 as a platform for angel investors by Bansal, a veteran finance professional. It was formerly known as CXO Genie. It participates mostly in the seed stage funding rounds for Indian start-ups and has made 26 investments so far.
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