Milkbasket gets $7 million funding from Mayfield, others

Bengaluru: Micro-delivery startup, Milkbasket, has raised $7 million as part of its Series A funding round led by Mayfield Advisors, the company said on Tuesday. Existing investors, including Kalaari Capital, Unilever Ventures and Beenext Pte Ltd, also participated in the round.

US-based Mayfield Advisors, a venture capital that invests in consumer and enterprise companies across non-tech, tech-enabled, and technology verticals, has backed several companies, including meat start-up Licious, online food ordering platform Box8 and education start-up Simplilearn.

“In 2015, Milkbasket was created as India’s first micro-delivery service for today’s busy households to fulfil their grocery needs by eliminating the hassles associated with traditional offline and online grocery buying,” said Anant Goel, co-founder and chief executive officer, Milkbasket.

The company aims to remove “the listing habit” that people have before buying groceries. “I never saw my mother making a list to buy groceries. She used to buy vegetables on a daily basis from the sabjiwala. If someone realizes that they are short of some ingredient we don’t want them to wait for 2-3 days till their grocery gets delivered,” Goel said in an interview.

In May, Milkbasket had raised another $7 million as part of its Series A funding round led by Kalaari Capital, bringing its total Series A fund-raise to $14 million.

The firm will use the funds to improve its technology infrastructure, hire new hands and expand its services to at least one new city. “Currently, Milkbasket operates in Gurugram and Noida, and we are looking to start operations in either Mumbai, Pune or Hyderabad,” said Goel.

Goel, a former Infosys executive, had teamed up with consultant Ashish Goel, Yatish Talavdia, Anurag Jain and Ekwe Chiwundu Charles to launch Milkbasket. The app-based start-up delivers milk, bread, vegetables, dairy products and grocery for orders even as low as ₹ 5. It claims to have completed 5 million orders, serving 50,000 families and 600 communities.

In the micro-delivery space, Milkbasket competes with Sequoia-backed DailyNinja, Noida-based MrNeeds and Snapdeal-backed Supr Daily, among others.

Food delivery startup Swiggy and online groceries startup BigBasket are also looking to double down on the micro-delivery segment.

Bigbasket, which was in talks to invest in DailyNinja, has already entered the segment through the acquisition of RainCan, a subscription-based company, and MorningCart.