Online grocer Grofers gets $10mn top-up funding from UAE-based investor

Online grocer Grofers has raised another $10 million in what appears to be a top-up to its latest funding round, The Economic Times reported.

The report, which cited documents sourced by private market data and intelligence research platform paper.vc, said the Singapore and Gurugram-based online grocer raised the funds from UAE-based Abu Dhabi Capital Group.

However, Financial Express reported that the investment was made through Capital Investment LLC, an associate company of Abu Dhabi Capital Capital Group LLC. TechCircle could not verify this independently.

E-mail queries sent to Grofers seeking more information on this funding round did not immediately elicit a response at the time of filing this report.

The fresh round of funding comes even as the company raised a $200 million-plus (Rs 1,406 crore at the current exchange rate) funding round from existing investors SoftBank, Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital. The round also saw Korea-based KTB Ventures coming on board as the new investor.

Grofers, which was founded in 2013 by Albinder Dhindsa and Saurabh Kumar, grew rapidly and was one of the most heavily-funded grocery startups. However, the expansion took a toll on the firm, and in 2016, it exited nine cities, laid-off employees and tweaked its business model to an inventory-led one. Currently, it operates in 13 cities.

In June, Grofers announced its foray into the milk business with the launch of the G-Fresh Milk brand.

The recent funding raised by the company also heats up the online grocery space where Bigbasket raised funds recently and Walmart and Amazon are ramping up their grocery operations.

In April, Flipkart launched its grocery operations in Mumbai.

Bigbasket, which is currently considered the market leader, operates in 10 large cities and 15 tier-II cities. In an interaction with TechCircle around a year ago, Bigbasket co-founder Hari Menon had hinted at unmanned offline grocery stores, along the lines of Amazon Go in the US and Alibaba’s Hema store in China.

Meanwhile, Amazon is aggressively expanding its food retail business in India after overcoming regulatory hurdles. According to recent media reports, Amazon Retail India Pvt. Ltd (ARIPL) plans to take its operations to 60 more small cities over the next year. ARIPL is currently present in 100 tier-II and tier-III cities.