Ex-Flipsters' Udaan raises $10mn Series A funding led by LightSpeed Ventures

Udaan, a B2B platform that makes trading simple, safe and convenient, today confirmed that it has raised Series A funding of $10 million in a round led by LightSpeed Ventures. For close to a year now, Sujeet Kumar, who led WS Retail Pvt. Ltd at Flipkart, Amod Malviya, ex-CTO of Flipkart, and Vaibhav Gupta, former Senior VP at Flipkart, have been putting their heads together and working on Udaan.

Confirming the funding, partner at LightSpeed Ventures Bejul Somaia, who will be joining the board of Udaan, said that it is a rare and exciting opportunity to back an experienced team of founders like Sujeet, Amod and Vaibhav, who had worked at Flipkart for several years.

Currently in its beta, Udaan is set to be launched soon, although the exact timeline of the launch is yet to be confirmed.

This is the second Flipkart mafia team that has raised Series A funding before an official launch this year. In July, Mukesh Bansal and Ankit Nagori, former Myntra and Flipkart executives, raised $15 million in funding from Accel Partners, IDG Ventures and Kalaari Capital.

The team at Udaan is presently focused on building the product. They hope to be able to give more details once they are closer to the launch.

The trio had been instrumental in Flipkart’s growth and success during its glory days. Coming with stellar backgrounds and prestigious institutions like IIT Delhi and IIT Kharagpur as their alma maters, the trio is, with Udaan, strongly focused on bridging the gaps in the B2B space. Amod has also invested in the AI startup SnapShopr, and the others have been active angel investors and mentors as well.

According to some rough industry estimates, B2B e-commerce is a $500 billion market in its early stages in India. There are 4.8 crore SMEs that need to secure bulk supplies, and that's a much bigger opportunity than B2C e-commerce. A report by Frost & Sullivan suggests that by 2020, the B2B e-commerce market will be worth $12 trillion. This trend makes B2B e-commerce almost thrice as big as the B2C market.

Alibaba is a pioneer in the B2B e-commerce space, with a GMV of a whopping $27.28 billion. Currently, China, the US and Japan are the biggest drivers of the B2B e-commerce market. In India, the B2B e-commerce market is expected to touch $674 billion.

Earlier this month, Accel Partners-backed Bizongo, the B2B packaging marketplace, had raised $3 million in Series A funding from IDG Ventures.

Other players in the space include Wholesalebox, Wydr (founded by an ex-Shopclues founding member), and IndustryBuying, a B2B platform for industrial products.