Cash-flows are healthy, don't need funding: Grofers' Albinder Dhindsa

In a Q&A, the CEO and Co-Founder of the firm that has rebranded itself as Blinkit, dwells on the need for rechristening and the company's strategy going ahead

Grocery delivery company Grofers announced on Monday that it has rebranded itself as Blinkit. In the past four months, the eight-year-old company, which was valued at $1.07 billion when it raised $100 million from Zomato in July, has pivoted its business model from grocery deliveries to delivering essentials within 10 minutes. Albinder Dhindsa, CEO and Co-Founder of Blinkit, spoke to Deepsekhar Choudhury about the company’s strategy going ahead.

What drove you to take the decision to re-brand as Blinkit?

We are scaling up fairly quickly in the 10-minute deliveries space. So, we wanted our branding to reflect the speed and the fact that we are beyond just groceries. That is why we took the decision to rebrand as Blinkit a week back on a Sunday and here we are now.

Also, our business is doubling in terms of number of orders every 30 days. A customer who orders one week will come back to order next week in 60 per cent of the cases. This is an extremely high customer retention rate.

There were reports that Zomato will invest again through a $500 million round. How much capital are you looking to raise in the near term?

Even at where we are today, with our existing cash flows, we have a healthy business and we don't need to raise more capital. We have not made any new funding announcements and are well-capitalised as of now. Of course, we will keep evaluating the needs of the business, what kind of capital allocation is required.

Grofers was a scaled-up business already whereas Blinkit is a recent pivot. What is the size of your 10-minute deliveries business at present?

We started doing 10-minute deliveries four months back and have opened 248 dark stores already. We are opening a dark store every four hours. I think any month we would be close to 2 million users currently while we have 10 million transacting users, historically, due to the Grofers legacy.

We are in 12 cities currently and aim to be in 100 cities by March next year. Our annualised GMV (gross merchandise value) is $600 million currently and we are looking to hit $1 billion soon.

Grofers was present in 27 cities. What happens to those operations now?

We are launching in every new locality and city with the promise of 10-minute delivery itself. We have deprecated any part of the businesses that did not come into the 10-minute bracket.

Older players like Swiggy are entering quick commerce while a number of new start-ups like Zepto are emerging with the promise of instant deliveries. Do you think it will become a game of who can offer more discounts?

I think the product-market fit that we are demonstrating will attract a lot of competition to enter the space. I think that's a good thing as that the ecosystem gets built when more players come in. Just like everything else, the winner will be determined on the basis of who executes better.

I don’t think we are making a lot of investments in marketing. We would rather invest in our technology and infrastructure on ground.

You are also looking at categories besides grocery. What is the strategy of choosing which ones to enter first?

We are going by what consumers want at any point of time and not planning categories per se. For instance, customers are looking for safety pins and wedding envelopes as this is the wedding season. So, we are also selling those things now.

What are the challenges you have to solve in 10-minute deliveries compared to Grofers?

I think a lot of the complexities have to be solved – finding the right local merchants, working with them, educating them on how to operate a store which is built for faster picking and for 10 minute delivery. And of course, we had our existing technology backbone for a lot of these things which help us get there faster. In the next phase, we have to build up the tech even further up to actually manage this.