Hyper-local grocery app Grofers will zip to more Indian cities with $10M from Tiger Global, Sequoia

Hyper-local grocery delivery service Grofers has raised US$10 million in series A funding from existing investor Sequoia Capital and new investor Tiger Global. This comes close on the heels of its seed round in December.

The Gurgaon-based company started out in Delhi and expanded to Mumbai and Bangalore. Now, with the funding, the service will be expanded to other cities in India.

Although ecommerce is making rapid strides in step with the increase in smartphone usage and internet penetration, local retailers, called kirana shops, are still the go-to places for most Indian households. There are an estimated 12 million kirana shops across the country.

For urban shoppers like me in India, hybrid shopping is the preferred mode. While I’m comfortable ordering many standard grocery products online – at attractive discounts – for things like fresh fruits and vegetables and meats, I would much rather go to the local shops. Besides, there are times when you want something straightaway and hop across to the local shop.

This is where Grofers can help. It promises to deliver within 90 minutes anything from shops in your locality which are on the platform. For the kirana shops, this means more orders as well as better logistics than relying on their own delivery men. Grofers riders zip around on two-wheelers picking up goods from retailers and delivering them to customers, while the app tracks orders.

IIT graduates Albinder Dhindsa and Saurabh Kumar founded Grofers with a low-cost logistics model. “We do purely drop-shipping with no warehouse,” explains Dhindsa, who has an MBA from Columbia University.

Some large offline retail chains like Reliance Fresh have recently come aboard the platform to expand their reach with the last-mile connectivity that Grofers provides. Ecommerce sites have also been exploring ways to use the vast network of kirana stores to solve delivery problems and reduce costs. So a partnership with them too may be on the cards once Grofers expands with the new funding.

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