Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant, has led a $300 million funding round in India’s online grocery start-up bigbasket.com. The Bengaluru-based bigbasket said other investors, including Abraaj Capital, Sands Capital and International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group, also participated in the round.
Farmer networks
The firm said it planned to use the money to build farmer networks, expand deeper into existing cities and become the most preferred employer for blue-collar jobs. “The funds will be directed towards bettering our technological, analytical, and infrastructural prowess, all of which will enable the company to move up the curve,” said Hari Menon, CEO and co-founder, bigbasket, in a statement.
Mr. Menon co-founded bigbasket in December 2011 in Bengaluru along with V. S. Sudhakar, Vipul Parekh, V. S. Ramesh and Abhinay Choudhari. The team had earlier set up India’s first e-commerce site FabMart.com in 1999. They later established Fabmall-Trinethra which expanded to a chain of more than 200 grocery supermarket stores in southern India. Bigbasket said India’s retail market is now worth more than $900 billion with grocery shopping accounting for about $600 billion. Rather than focusing on expansion into more cities, the company said it was planning to dig deeper into the cities where it already had a foothold.
Mr. Menon said the firm was currently partnering about 1,800 farmers throughout the country and would increase the number to 3,000. In addition to collaborating with farmers and gaining a larger customer base, the company said the third big priority was to become a leading employer of blue-collar workers in the country. The current employee strength of bigbasket is 16,000.
Bigbasket, which operates in 30 cities in the country, said it closed the previous fiscal year (2016-17) with ₹1,410 crore in revenue. The firm said it was clocking ₹200 crore in monthly run-rate. This was expected to increase to ₹300 crore in August 2018 and ₹500 crore in March 2019, according to the company.
