In a move to fuel its growth in the e-grocery segment in India, Grofers, a low price online supermarket raised Rs.400 crore in a fresh funding round led by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group, Tiger Global and Apoletto Asia, thus bringing its total fund raised to USD 226.5 million.
With the new Series E round, Grofers will continue to invest in building private labels and supply chain improvements. A significant amount of investment will go towards building infrastructure and technology and efficient supply chain management to achieve deeper penetration in existing Grofers cities.
"This fresh round by our existing investors is a vote of confidence and trust in the turnaround at Grofers. We took some hard decisions to fix parts of the business that were not scaling well. Our efforts have clearly contributed in making sure we have a clear path to profitability as well as the largest market share in the online grocery segment; having grown four-fold in the last one year for monthly sales in excess of Rs.100 crore," said grofers co-founder and CEO, Albinder Dhindsa.
Founded in 2013, The online grocer currently clocks an average of 25,000 orders a day with an order value of Rs.1400. It has previously raised USD 166.5 million from investors like SoftBank, Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global.
On a related note, with Indian customers getting more familiar with online grocery shopping, the overall online grocery market is expected to move up the curve and touch USD 1 billion by this year compared to USD 600 million in 2016.