[Funding alert] B2B food marketplace Jumbotail raises $85M in Series C round

Retail platform and food and grocery B2B marketplace, Jumbotail, has raised $85M in a Series C funding round led by Artal Asia Pte. Ltd., an  affiliate of global equity investment firm Invus. 

This round brings the total capital raised to $125 million. The Bengaluru-based startup had raised Rs 35 crore in debt from Alteria Capital in June this year.  Prior to that, Jumbotail had raised $25 million in an equity round completed in January 2021.

“We nearly quadrupled our scale in 2021 and are looking to further accelerate our growth trajectory in the coming year,” Ashish Jhina, Co-founder & COO, Jumbotail, said. “We will continue to invest aggressively to make Jumbotail the pre-eminent destination for food and grocery brands to reach the overwhelming majority of India’s consumers through our pan-India network of kirana partners,” he added.

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Francis Cukierman, Managing Director, Invus Asia and Benjamin Felt, Managing Director, Invus US will join Jumbotail’s Board of Directors. “We are thrilled to embark on such a partnership with Jumbotail, which is rapidly emerging as an industry-defining company in B2B eCommerce. We share Ashish and Karthik’s vision of digitising kirana stores to transform India’s food and grocery retail landscape at scale,” they commented.

Ajax Capital, the family office of FMCG entrepreneur Ajay Gupta, also participated in the round, which saw a combination of primary and secondary investments.

Jumbotail’s early investors Nexus Venture Partners and Kalaari Capital took minor part-exits in the secondary investments in Series C round. 

Founded in 2015 by Stanford MBA classmates S Karthik Venkateswaran and Ashish Jhina, Jumbotail helps largely unorganised neighbourhood kirana stores network with its full stack ecommerce model consisting of its B2B marketplace platform, warehousing and last-mile delivery supply chain network, and a fintech platform for payment and credit solutions for the store owners. It claims to connect nearly 2000 FMCG & staples brands and sellers to kirana stores ities and towns in India. 

With the funding, Jumbotail plans to triple its engineering, product, design, data science, category management, marketing, and finance teams from 400 members presently and scale its core B2B marketplace to 100 cities and towns across India. It is present in 28 cities, at the moment. 

It also aims to expand its network of J24 stores, invest in large scale kirana entrepreneur skill development initiatives, and further strengthen its Go-To-Market services to support regional and new age FMCG brands.