Former Foodpanda, Ola exec joins egrocer Milkbasket

Daily grocery delivery platform Milkbasket has appointed Nitin Gupta as its head of engineering.

Gupta left food delivery platform Foodpanda in April this year where he led the engineering and development teams. He also spent six years at ride-hailing unicorn Ola.

Founded in 2015, Milkbasket serves about 200,000 households across seven cities. 

“Milkbasket is the most loved grocery platform - solving a real customer problem, and I am excited to work with Anant and the team to scale Milkbasket to new heights and make it a formidable e-grocery startup for the world,” Gupta said on his appointment.

Prior to Foodpanda and Ola, Gupta was associated with another unicorn, Flipkart after spending his software engineering career’s nascent years with game developer Bwin.party.

“Technology is at the core of what we do every day. Technology, we believe, is also our edge and defensive moat against many heavily funded players in this space,” said Anant Goel, chief executive and co-founder, Milkbasket.

The microdelivery startups’s platform currently has features like one-click buying, no checkout and contactless delivery. It fulfills grocery needs of 150,000 households before 7 AM daily and does so with 75,000 orders in a day.

Built on the unique Indian habit of getting fresh milk delivered at home every morning, Milkbasket was founded by Anant Goel, Ashish Goel, Anurag Jain and Yatish Talvadia with a vision to become the “default mom & pop shop” for over a million households by 2021.

The egrocer has till date raised close to $26 million from Mayfield Advisors, Beenext, Kalaari Capital, Unilever Ventures, Lenovo Capital (LCIG), Blume Ventures and few family offices and $2.2 million in debt funding led by Innoven Capital. 

In July, it acquired Bengaluru-based PSR Supply Chain in a deal whose terms were undisclosed - its second acquisition till date. In March, it bought Noida-based online grocery venture Veggie India.