[Funding alert] Wholesale marketplace Jumbotail raises Rs 90 Cr in Series B funding

Bengaluru-based online wholesale marketplace, Jumbotail raised Rs 90 crore in a Series B round. The funding round was led by Heron Rock, with participation from Capria Fund, BNK Ventures and William Jarvis.

Existing investors Kalaari Capital and Nexus Venture Partners also participated in the round.

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The marketplace for food and grocery products will be using the funds to invest in artificial intelligence (AI)-driven operational excellence in supply chain. The startup will also be directing the funds to on-board a new FMCG brand, expand its team, integrate backward to farmers and also forward its integration to the Jumbotail platform with PoS.

Sameer Brij Verma, Managing Director of Nexus Venture Partners said:

"Jumbotail's full-stack approach to modernise general trade via cutting-edge tech driven supply chain, data-driven merchandising and credit is the most scalable way to revolutionise India's grocery retail. The company is well positioned to power the online-to-offline new retail rollouts in the country in the coming years."

Jumbotail was founded by Standford MBA classmates in November 2015 by Stanford alumni S. Karthik Venkateswaran and Ashish Jhina. Jumbotails connects tens of thousands of kirana stores with brands and producers via its marketplace platform. Its mobile application helps kirana stores function using technology.

The online marketplace had raised $8.5 million in Series A funding from Kalaari Capital and Nexus Venture Partners, in July 2017.

Karthik, also a marketplace product veteran from e-Bay and Flipkart, said:

"We have built a great team of missionaries relentlessly focused on solving very hard problems in unorganised food and grocery value chain, using first principles thinking. We are the friend of the Kirana stores, and we believe truly transformative solutions to this problem require a full stack approach. Our technology and supply chain operational capabilities will help modernize traditional kirana stores at scale, in a very capital efficient manner”.

Jumbotail provides full-stack services, including storefront delivery and payments collection for its sellers, as well as working capital credit from third-party credit providers, to its customers using transactional data and proprietary algorithms.

Rajesh Raju, Managing Director, Kalaari Capital, says:

“Food and grocery is a rapidly growing $300 billion plus market in India which will be serviced predominantly by the kirana stores for the foreseeable future. Creating value for millions of kirana stores, and their ecosystem of brands and consumers is one of the hardest problems to solve, and we believe Jumbotail has the right team to do this.”

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