Grofers plans to raise Rs 200 crore soon

Grofers, the Gurugram based grocery delivery firm, on Thursday said it plans to raise Rs 200 crore again to meet the growth demand.

In an interaction with DH, Grofers Co-Founder and CEO Albinder Dhindsa said the fresh round of fund is necessitated by the exponential growth the company is registering for the last couple of months.

"We recently raised Rs 400 crore (around $62 million) in a Series E round led by existing investor Japanese Internet conglomerate SoftBank. Now we are again plans to raise Rs 200 crore to meet Grofers exponential growth," he said.

Dhindsa the new fund raising will be led by existing investors and supported by couple of new investors. Grofers raised total fund of $226.5 million till now.

India's online grocery market is estimated to be Rs 65 billion and Groffers has a gross merchandise value of almost Rs 10 billion. The other competitor BigBasket occupies almost Rs 20 billion worth of GMV.

"Grofers registered 4X growth last year and expects this year to register a minimum growth of 3X. Grofers will be operationally profitable by 2021," said Dhindsa.

Grofers, founded by Saurabh Kumar and Albinder Dhindsa in 2013, is now present in 13 cities in India and clocks an average of 25,000 orders a day with an order value of Rs 1400.

"Our single minded focus is to cater to the demands of middle class and lower middle class who do not have access to supermarket. We are taking 12% margin and pass on the benefits to our customers and focus on B to C customers only," he said.

The company finds that the new investment will further expand its sourcing ecosystem and private labels along with different manufacturers.

"We have 4000 employees now and majority of these workers are in the operations side. Grofers has a tech team of 60 members. We will continue to hire this year also for different positions," he said.