Bengaluru-based DailyNinja raises funding led by NuVentures’ Venk Krishnan

DailyNinja, a subscription-based hyperlocal platform for everyday essentials, has raised a pre-series A round of funding led by Venk Krishnan, Partner, NuVentures, an existing investor. Other key investors in the round include Aprameya Radhakrishna, Founder of TaxiForSure; Anupam Mittal of Shaadi.com, Kunal Shah of Freecharge; Tracxn Labs; Subramanya SV, ex-Partner at BVP; Ravi Garkipati (EIR and SVP at Flipkart) apart from several other Indian and Singapore-based investors. The round was raised using the LetsVenture platform and TracxnSyndicate.

The funds will be utilised primarily to upgrade operations and expand the customer base.

Sagar Yarnalkar, Co-founder of DailyNinja claims,

DailyNinja has already become an established player within this segment and currently delivers to more than 6500 households everyday within Bengaluru. Our unique model has shown sustainable unit economics along with a huge scale across the complete customer base.

Incorporated in June 2015 by Sagar and Anurag Gupta, DailyNinja’s conception stems from the founders’ personal experience when trying to order groceries online. Waiting for groceries to be delivered to their place, delivery timings overlapping with office hours, co-ordination with the delivery personnel and the dependency on grocery shops for smaller purchases made them realise there was a problem that needed to be solved.

DailyNinja was thus conceptualised to give its customers the easiest, hassle-free ordering experience ideally suited to high frequency ordering of household needs with a prepaid subscription-based model.

According to DailyNinja, its model is unique. It builds upon a dense customer base by focusing on certain pockets of the city ensuring high efficiency in its delivery process. It says that its current cost per delivery is Rs 3, which will cut down to half as it grows. Scheduled deliveries in morning also helps it move fast and avoid traffic while having 100 percent fulfilment. Subscription-based daily deliveries ensure it reaches subscribers homes every day, thus implying that returns can be easily picked up the next day at no cost.

“As our model has the backbone of subscriptions, we have next to zero churn and unbelievable user engagement statistics. A customer opens the app four times a week on an average mostly leading to transactions,” says Sagar.

Talking on investment, lead investor Venk Krishnan says that the DailyNinja team has figured out a unique highly scalable and efficient delivery model of daily household products. They have scaled up to a significant volume in a very short time. And he truly believes in their vision and execution capability.

The groceries segment holds a share of 60 percent of the total market value in the Indian retail market as food is a basic requirement. The food and grocery industry in India is now worth $383 billion and is expected to touch $1 trillion by 2020, according to a study by advisory firm Technopak.

The major players in the market that lead from the front are Big Basket, ZopNow, and Grofers, among others. However, this year, this segment has also witnessed the shutdown of one of the major players ‑ Peppertap. Since then, the hype around the segment has surely reduced and the subject of unit economics has come on priority.