Exclusive: Jugnoo close to Series C funding round

SoCoMo Technologies Pvt Ltd, which runs on-demand delivery services and urban transport aggregator startup Jugnoo, is in advanced talks to raise its Series C round of funding that would give it a medium term investment runway to expand its business.

Samar Singla, co-founder and CEO, Jugnoo told Techcircle.in that existing investor Paytm has already committed to participate.

For more details on the proposed transaction, click here.

The proposed deal would make it one of the fastest to swallow a follow-on VC funding round.

In November 2015, Jugnoo had raised $3M in Series B funding from a group of investors led by Paytm. In May 2015, the delivery services startup had raised $5 million (Rs 32 crore) in Series A funding from Snow Leopard Technology Ventures, Paytm and other investors.

Before that, it raised $1 million from Rakesh Mathur, co-founder of Junglee that was acquired and relaunched by Amazon; Vikas Taneja, partner and managing director of BCG Group; Kirloskar Brothers and others in a seed round in early 2015.

The Chandigarh-based startup was co-founded by IIT-Delhi alumni Singla and Chinmay Aggarwal in November 2014. It focuses on four segments—auto booking services, taxi aggregation, online ordering and home delivery of meals and groceries.

Jugnoo offers auto-rickshaw aggregation service in 22 cities across the country. It plans to launch its services in 25 more cities in the next six months and 50 more cities by next year.

"In 2016, autos will become bigger than cabs and Jugnoo will become bigger than Ola and Uber. We are doing around 30,000 transactions at this moment per day," claims Singla.

According to Singla, a lot of things will change for autorickshaw aggregators in 2016 and focus on unit economics will be important.

"The time to burn cash and grow is over and focusing on unit economics is very critical now. If you see our growth, it is very unit economics focused," added Singla.

Singla said Jugnoo was growing at 60-70 per cent month-on-month and has achieved break-even in certain cities.

"We are a very city-centric market and we have already achieved break-even in a few cities. The cash burn in some of the cities where we launched our services initially has reduced drastically. In the next one year, at least 50 per cent of our cities will be breaking even," said Singla.

The taxi aggregation play was added in July when Jugnoo acquired BookMyCab in a cash-and-stock deal.

Jugnoo (along with BookMyCab) competes with the likes of Ola, Uber, Meru and mGaadi (only auto-rickshaws) among several others. While Ola also offers autorickshaw booking service, Uber had last month suspended that side of the business.

Jugnoo had recently acquired restaurant discovery app Bistro Offers and mobile-only services marketplace yelo.red.

In the grocery delivery space, Jugnoo competes with Grofers, PepperTap and BigBasket, among others.

Alibaba-backed Paytm, which recently crossed the 100 million users threshold for its mobile wallet, has put money in startups such as Zovi, Little and others. It recently invested $10 million in LogiNext Solution Pvt Ltd, a location-based analytics startup for logistics management.