Snapdeal backed PepperTap is out to be the biggest name in online grocery market This investment marks another milestone towards Snapdeal's vision to create India's most impactful digital commerce ecosystem for buyers and sellers.
By Entrepreneur India •
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The action packed on-demand hyperlocal grocery delivery space in India is heating up day by day, and start-ups mushrooming in this space are demonstrating their potential to grow big. With the domestic online retail industry evolving into a hyperlocal on-demand marketplace, India's eCommerce market is estimated to grow 15 times to $300 billion by 2030, according to Goldman Sachs report. As a result, the online grocery market is garnering huge investors' interest from the past few months, with players like PepperTap, Grofers, BigBasket, and LocalBanya amongst others giving neck-to-neck fight to each other.
Today, Gurgaon-based on-demand hyperlocal grocery delivery service PepperTap has closed a Series B funding round of $36 million. The latest funding round was led by Snapdeal along with existing investors Sequoia India and SAIF Partners. The funding also saw participation from new investors like Ru-net, JAFCO, and BeeNext. Additionally, PepperTap is in advance talks to expand this round by another $20 million from other financial investors. This second close is expected to happen in the next few weeks.
Speaking on the investment, Navneet Singh, Co-Founder and CEO, PepperTap, said, "PepperTap has been on a hyper-growth track since its inception 9 months ago. From less than $1 million GMV run rate at the start of fiscal year 2015-16, we are solidly on track to end the year with a GMV run-rate of over $250 million. Investment by an established player like Snapdeal is a stamp on our asset-light, low burn business model and our execution track record. We look forward to leveraging Snapdeal's experience to help our partner stores develop their capabilities and multiply their sales."
This investment marks another milestone towards Snapdeal's vision to create India's most impactful digital commerce ecosystem for buyers and sellers. Further commenting on the same, Kunal Bahl, CEO, Snapdeal added, "We are excited to be entering into a strategic partnership with PepperTap. Navneet and his team have done a phenomenal job in building PepperTap into India's leading grocery ordering platform. We look forward to working closely with PepperTap to make them very successful, leveraging the capabilities we have built in Snapdeal's ecosystem."
Founded by Navneet Singh and Milind Sharma in November 2014, PepperTap has a unique business model to India and similar to Instacart in the US. It partners with local grocery stores to take their inventory online, and help customers in the relevant hyper-locality order from the local stores. The stores get access to a much larger customer base, thereby getting high incremental sales. Offering customers over 15,000 products categories, PepperTap claims to generate about 20,000 transactions per day on an average.
Ravi Adusumalli of SAIF Partners added, "Since our investments a short while ago, the team at PepperTap has done an extraordinary job of growing and establishing themselves as the clear leader in the hyperlocal grocery space. We believe that this is a massive market and our focus only on groceries will enable us to have the best customer service in the market."
With the infusion of fresh funds, PepperTap plans to expand its presence to 75 new cities across India by the end of the current fiscal year. Currently, the startup operates across 17 Indian cities. The company also plans to invest heavily in strengthening its technology and supply chain capabilities. PepperTap expects to have more than 5,000 staff by year end to support its operations.
Shailendra Singh, Managing Director, Sequoia Capital India Advisors, said, "PepperTap is making exciting progress in building the most efficient hyper-local infrastructure to deliver a great user experience for grocery shopping." In recent past, the startup had already raised seed round of $1.2 million from Sequoia India in November 2014, and Series A investment of $10 million with equal participation from SAIF Partners and Sequoia India.
