[Funding alert] Retail aggregator F5 raises seed round from LetsVenture investors

New Delhi-based 'retail aggregator' F5 recently said it has raised an undisclosed seed round of funding led by investors from LetsVenture.

The investors who participated in the round include Madhusudan Kela-backed Singularity, Mohit Satyanand (Director, DFM Foods; Chairman & Founder, Teamworks Art), Varun Laul (MD, Zodius Advisors), Tres Ventures, Huddle, and Startup Buddy amongst its early-stage investors.

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Founded in 2018 by IIM-Lucknow batchmates Raghav Arora and Lalit Kumar Aggarwal,  F5 provides opportunities for its partner vendors to upsell and cross sell their products ranging from refreshments to services, thus creating a frequent interactive mini-market and increasing revenues of its partners by 40 percent. 

Speaking on the solution offered by F5, Raghav Arora, Co-founder, F5, said, 

“Think of us as an aggregator of local but high-quality refreshment stores. For customers, we are a brand for their workplace needs that is fresher and more authentic than just a vending machine. For our vendors, we become their access point for multiple partnerships that can boost their business and revenues. F5 is also becoming a unique supply chain for many tech and non-tech consumer brands.”

The startup at present is incubated by Gurugram-based incubator Huddle.  

Currently, the go-to-market product by F5 is tea. F5 has on-boarded more than 10 vendors and has over 500 paid subscribers in Delhi and Lucknow. The platform claims it currently sells more than 8,000 cups of tea per day, with annual revenues of Rs 1.5 crore.

While, Sanjay Jha, Co-founder, LetsVenture added,

“F5 is organising a large ‘unorganised market’, providing a better-quality product to large number of consumers while at the same time improving business outcomes for the vendors on their platform. They’ve created an asset light model that is replicable and scalable and that is what attracted investors to F5.”

Commenting on the deal, Sanil Sachar from Huddle said,

“Incubating the F5 team has been a delight due to the operational expertise the team comes with and the learnings they have picked up through their early growth phase. The team has constructed a framework to organise the vast and unorganised vendor market, whilst creating customers out of SMEs! Their intent to constantly grow, provide a better livelihood to the unorganised vendor market, and fulfil a latent demand – these are the reasons we continue to support the team.”

Over the next year, F5 is looking to expand the scope of its retail aggregation through “workplace retail delivery service” by offering retail products like earphones, chargers and services like delivery pickups and drop offs, micro ATMs, recharges, and so on.

(Edited by Megha Reddy)