B2B grocery delivery startup Jumbotail completes $25 mn funding round

Business-to-business (B2B) grocery delivery startup Jumbotail Technologies on Friday said it had raised $14.2 million in a funding round dubbed ‘Series B3’, completing a targeted $25 million investment round.

The funding round was led by VII Ventures, said a statement. Other investors in the round were Nutresa, Veronorte, Jumbofund, Klinkert Investment Trust, Peter Crosby Trust, Nexus Venture Partners, Discovery Ventures, and a group of high networth individuals (HNIs) and industry leaders.

The funding comes about two months after the Bengaluru-headquartered company raised $11 million in a round dubbed ‘Series B2’.

The company, co-founder Ashish Jhina said, is at an inflection point in its growth trajectory. It is seeing tremendous interest from investors across the globe, he added.

“We will use this capital to scale the business to new regions, to double down on our J24 store network and to launch a suite of services to help FMCG brands go to market exponentially faster and at the lowest cost. We are looking to bring in more top talent across the entire company to power this explosive growth,” Jhina said.

Founded in 2020 by Chadi Hajjar, Saudi Arabia based VII Ventures is a stage-agnostic venture capital group investing companies in the United States, India, Canada and Europe. It has invested in over 14 start-ups, as per its website on Friday.

Jumbotail claims to serve 30,000 kirana stores via its full stack ecommerce model consisting of its B2B marketplace platform, an industry leading warehousing and last-mile delivery supply chain network, and a fintech platform for payment and credit solutions to kirana store owners.

The company’s new retail platform transforms kirana stores into modern omni-channel convenience grocery stores under the J24 brand within 24-48 hours. J24 offers kirana retailers a full suite of in-store technology and insights, daily fulfillment of thousands of products, a B2C online store as well as loyalty solutions to connect retailers to their consumers, in addition to omnichannel integrations with hyperlocal platforms such as Dunzo and Swiggy.

“Jumbotail’s New Retail platform powering J24 Stores is revolutionary, and their full stack approach is the most cost efficient and scalable way to modernize kirana stores. We have been firm believers in the team and their approach from the very beginning,” Sameer Brij Verma, managing director at Nexus Venture Partners said.

Watch: Ashish Jhina on how Jumbotail is turning kiranas into omni-channel grocery stores

Jumbotail was founded by Stanford University batchmates Karthik Venkateswaran and Jhina. While Karthik served with the Indian army in hard combat and is a marketplaces technology and product veteran from eBay in the US and Flipkart,  Jhina is a third generation apple farmer, and a former consultant with Boston Consulting Group. 

Jumbotail competes with the newly launched Flipkart Wholesale, Amazon’s B2B marketplace Amazon Business, Udaan, Reliance Market, along with other venture capital-backed startups such as Bijnis and Ninjacart.