Grocery e-tailer BigBasket raises $32.8M from Helion, Zodius, others

Online grocery retailer BigBasket.com, owned and operated by Bangalore-based SuperMarket Grocery Supplies Pvt Ltd, has secured Rs 200 crore ($32.8 million) in its Series B round of funding from Helion Venture Partners and Mumbai-based Zodius Capital.

The round also saw participations from its existing investors, including Ascent Capital; Srihari Kumar, founding partner of Singapore-based hedge fund LionRock Capital and former partner at TPG-Axon; and serial entrepreneur K Ganesh.

LionRock previously backed another grocery e-tailer RedMart.com, which in-turn is active in Singapore, where Kumar is based. Recently, RedMart set up a development centre in India.

"The capital from this round will be used to expand our operations to 10 cities, including Pune, Delhi and Chennai, besides expanding our product portfolio and improve the technology platform," BigBasket's co-founder Hari Menon told VCCircle/Techcircle.in.

The company was founded by a team of five –Sudhakar, Menon, Vipul Parekh, VS Ramesh and Abhinay Choudhari. The team has both offline and online retail experience, as they had earlier set up India's first e-commerce site FabMart.com in 1999, and then established the Fabmall-Trinethra chain of more than 200 grocery supermarket stores in southern India. Trinethra was sold to Aditya Birla Group in 2006 and currently operates under the brand name 'More'.

BigBasket.com is an online grocery store with operations in Mumbai & Hyderabad, besides Bangalore. As of April this year, the firm had 10,000 products and 1,000 brands in its grocery list that included fresh fruits and vegetables, rice and pulses, spices and seasonings, packaged bread, bakery and dairy products, and other branded foods.

In April this year, VCCircle/Techcircle.in first reported that BigBasket raised $3 million in bridge funding from LionRock's Srikari Kumar. BigBasket management had said that time this amount will become part of its impending Series B.

Previously, it had raised $10 million in its Series A funding from Ascent Capital.

In an earlier interaction on the sidelines of Techcircle Startup 2014 in February this year in Bangalore, Menon had said that the company was close to expanding its operations to six more cities. It would start with Delhi NCR, Chennai and Pune, and then would go to other cities including Ahmedabad and Chandigarh. Menon had also said that BigBasket was doing approximately 2,500 orders per day on an average, mostly from Bangalore, and was close to being Rs 100-crore company in terms of gross merchandise value (GMV). According to him, BigBasket had close to 70,000 customers in Bangalore alone.

While grocery remains the core business, the firm is also planning to add kitchenware to its category in the near future.

BigBasket is mainly competing with Naspers-owned Tradus.com, a location-based marketplace for fresh food & grocery, in some cities. Recently, Tradus' CEO Mudit Khosla quit the company. According to some media reports, Tradus is shutting down its business. There are others like MyGrahak, AaramShop among others operating in different markets.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)