Grab.in raises $1.5 M funding from SIDBI Venture Capital Limited

Emerging food delivery startup Grab.in raised a funding of $1.5 million from Small Industries Development Bank of India's (SIDBI) wholly owned subsidiary SIDBI Venture Capital Limited (SVCL). With this, SIDBI joins the list of Grab's investors that include Aramex , Zomato, Sixth Sense Ventures, and Oliphans Capital.

In 2015, Grab.in (formerly Grab a Grub) raised $1 million from Oliphans Capital and independent investor Haresh Chawla. In 2016, Aramex reportedly committed to invest $3 million and Zomato has an undisclosed investment in the startup too.

Grab provides hyperlocal and intra city logistics services to businesses encompassing restaurants, food tech platforms, groceries, e-commerce platforms, banks, and pharmacies. Founded by Jignesh Patel, Nishant Vora and Pratish Sanghvi in 2012, Grab is a food logistics firm.

At one point, Grab operated with over 350 restaurants in Mumbai alone and has been expanding gradually to other cities in India, so much so that it now operates in more than 23 cities serving clients such as Myntra, FedEx, Flipkart, McDonalds, Big Bazaar, Amazon, Dominos, FoodPanda, Zomato. It also provides services ranging from on-demand, reverse deliveries, first mile and last mile logistics.

Talking about the investment and the quantum of funding and utilisation, Pratish Sanghvi, Co-Founder of Grab.in, said,

We are excited to be backed by a government investment body. We have created significant traction past year and are reporting double digit gross margins, this fund raise is adequate for utilisation towards scaling up our smart locker platform and crowdsourced distribution centre model.

Grab was one of the earliest movers into this space that saw a number of entrants in 2015 such as RoadRunnr, Pickingo, Opinio, PepperTap, Parcelled. Speaking about profits, Pratish said that Grab is the only company in the space right now that is profitable. "We are making money out of every single order that we deliver. We have grown geographically and horizontally over the years and I credit the profitability and the scaling aspect of our growth to this kind of a horizontal stack," he says.

B2B food delivery is not a very simple space to thrive in but Grab.in is hopeful about the next few months in terms of further scaling. Very recently, Swiggy, the Bengaluru-based foodtech company has raised Series F funding of $100 million led by Meituan-Dianping, the Chinese e-commerce, and hyperlocal giant and existing investor Naspers.

When asked about where the fresh funding amount is going to be used in, Pratish said that it is going into a crowdsourcing distribution model that they are currently working on. However, Pratish is looking forward to more geographical expansion in the future.

Vikram Jain, who represents SIDBI Ventures, said,

At SIDBI, we were eyeing the technology led logistics startups for a while. What really stood out at Grab is their sector-agnostic approach and the best in the industry unit economics coupled with operations at scale. Grab is perhaps the first company which is making money and is few months away from being EBITDA positive.