Heron Rock leads Series B investment in wholesale marketplace Jumbotail

Jumbotail, an online marketplace for food and grocery items that caters to wholesale buyers, has raised Rs 90 crore (around $12.5 million at the current exchange rate) in a Series B round of funding.

The Bengaluru-headquartered firm said in a statement that the round was led by US-based Heron Rock, an omni-stage venture fund. Capria Fund, BNK Ventures and William Jarvis also contributed to the round, as did existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and Kalaari Capital.

Jumbotail said it will use the fresh capital to boost its artificial intelligence-driven supply chain, forward integration of its platform with point-of-sale (PoS) teams, team expansion and to establish new clients in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) segment.

Jumbotail was founded by Stanford University batchmates Karthik Venkateswaran and Ashish Jhina in November 2015.

Karthik served with the Indian army and also worked with eBay and Flipkart. Ashish Jhina was a consultant with the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) where he worked on a project to streamline India’s public distribution system (PDS) using Aadhaar.

Jumbotail says it connects tens of thousands of kirana stores with brands and producers via its marketplace.  

“We are levelling the playing field for millions of kirana stores by plugging them into our platform and helping them compete better in an increasingly technology-driven retail world,” said Jhina.

In another transaction in the segment, online marketplace Nagpur Wholesale had raised Rs 1 crore in a seed funding round from Omphalos Ventures India LLP last December.