Exclusive: DailyNinja investors get minority stakes in BigBasket via share-swap

DailyNinja investors Sequoia Capital India, Matrix Partners India and Saama Capital have acquired minority stakes in Supermarket Grocery Supplies, the Bengaluru-based company that owns online grocery platform BigBasket, following the recent acquisition of DailyNinja by the latter.

Following the acquisition, venture capital firms Sequoia and Saama Capital hold a 0.17% stake each in BigBasket while Matrix holds a 0.15% stake, regulatory filings showed.

The three venture capital firms received shares worth $5.6 million in Bigbasket as part of the stock-swap, taking significant haircuts on their original investments.

Email queries to BigBasket, Sequoia, Matrix and Saama Capital didn’t elicit responses at the time of publishing this article.

BigBasket acquired DailyNinja, which operates milk and grocery delivery services, in a stock-swap transaction. It allotted 561,965 equity shares, accounting for a 0.53% stake, at Rs 814.89 a share, totalling Rs 45.76 crore or about $6 million, according to the filings. The shares were allotted to 36 shareholders of Dailyninja including the three venture capital firms and angel investors such as Cred founder Kunal Shah and People Group founder Anupam Mittal.

Bengaluru-based DailyNinja had raised a little over $8 million since its inception, of which $6.5 million came from Sequoia, Matrix and Saama Capital, according to data compiled by VCCEdge data. 

Notably, DailyNinja founders Anurag Gupta and Sagar Yarnalkar were not allotted any shares in BigBasket as part of the transaction.

Bigbasket announced the acquisition last week in order to grow its micro-delivery business bbdaily 150%-200% over the next 12 months and consolidate its presence in the subscription delivery market. However, the financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. 

BigBasket had acquired subscription-based e-grocery Raincan in October 2018 and rebranded it as bbdaily. It makes about 160,000 deliveries a day including early morning essentials such as fruits and vegetables, bread, dairy and eggs and daily essentials such as breakfast cereals, tender coconut, personal care and baby care products. Currently, DailyNinja caters to around 110,000 customers daily with a network of 2,000 milkman partners across India. It was operational in five cities such as Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Mumbai and Pune.

In its most recent funding round, Bigbasket raised about $14.6 million in venture debt from Trifecta Capital to meet the working capital and capex requirements of the company. It had said at the time that the capital would also be used to scale up its supply chain for the milk subscription business. 

BigBasket’s main competitor is Grofers, backed by Tokyo headquartered SoftBank Group Corp. Last month, Grofers received $5.8 million from its Singapore-based parent company Grofers International. In 2019, Grofers claimed that it achieved break-even in two of its biggest markets, Delhi NCR and Kolkata aided by reduced last-mile costs and higher revenues. 

Other players such as ecommerce players such as Amazon and Flipkart and online food delivery platform Swiggy also have presence in the segment.