Sachin Bansal's BACQ and Milkbasket mutually decide not to go ahead with Rs 20 Cr investment
Two months after announcing that Sachin Bansal's BACQ had invested Rs 20 crore in Milkbasket, the Gurugram-based hyperlocal delivery platform issued a statement that both Milkbasket and BACQ had mutually decided not to proceed with the investment.
UPDATE: This story has been revised to reflect recent developments.
In April, Gurugram-based hyperlocal delivery startup Milkbasket announced that it had raised Rs 20 crore funding from Sachin Bansal's BACQ. However, the Milkbasket team earlier this month announced that Milkbasket and BACQ had mutually decided not to proceed with the investment.
At the time when the investment was announced, Anant Goel, Co-founder and CEO, Milkbasket, had said,
"We are excited to have Sachin Bansal and BACQ onboard. Milkbasket is now working on the next set of innovations to further consolidate its market leader position across it’s fresh (fruit and vegetables) offering, automating the daily delivery supply chain and reducing go to market time for multi-city expansion. These funds would provide us the needed CAPEX and R&D investments in all the three domains."
Anant Goel, Co-founder and CEO Milkbasket
Also read: Milkbasket raises additional $7M in funding round led by Mayfield Advisors
Founded in 2015, by Anant Goel, Ashish Goel, Anurag Jain, and Yatish Talvadia, Milkbasket wants to replace your local kirana store. It has raised close to $16 million from Mayfield Advisors, Beenext, Kalaari Capital, Unilever Ventures, Lenovo, and Blume Ventures.
On its app, items you add to your shopping cart between 7 am and midnight are delivered to you the next morning. And there’s no need for a checkout or payment because the purchase is pre-paid via a mobile wallet on the app, which you can top up whenever it runs out of funds. So, every time you choose an item on the app, the order is automatically placed without the need for a traditional ‘checkout’ or payment.
At present, the platform operates in Gurugram, Noida, Ghaziabad, and Bengaluru. According to CRISIL, the online retail market in India is expected to grow 250 percent to touch Rs 1.8 trillion by fiscal 2020.
The hyperlocal space is heating up again. Bengaluru already has DailyNinja, which raised $4.5 million in funding in October 2018. The company claims to deliver close to 25,000 households every day, clocking over 7.5 lakh orders every month. By December 2018, the number had grown to over 55,000. There is also Doodhwala, which is fast growing.