The business-to-business electronic commerce platform Udaan has raised $500 million in a Series B round of funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Lightspeed India and DST Global founder Yuri Milner’s personal investment vehicle Apoletto. It also involved Ravi Mhatre from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Bejul Somaia from Lightspeed India also took part in the transaction.
This funding is recognised to be one of the biggest funding rounds at an early stage in the Indian startup ecosystem. The company is going to use the current funding’s to hire more engineers and sales executives, expand its logistics network, to add new sellers and buyers and to introduce new services.
“B2B ecommerce is a big market opportunity with 500 million SMEs doing annual trade worth of $600-800 billion. Inefficiencies need to be solved in the areas of distribution, sales, marketing, among others. We’ve raised this round because we have validation that our product is working. The market opportunity is huge. We also account for more than 15-20% of the business of many of the sellers on the platform. And our average repeat transactions are seven times a month. These metrics are big validation that there’s massive demand for our kind of end-to-end marketplace,” said the co-founder Sujeet Kumar on the recent raise.
The e-commerce platform which was founded by former Flipkart executives Vaibhav Gupta, Amod Malviya and Sujeet Kumar claims it to have grown at a larger pace since its launch in 2017. It has recorded seven-time monthly repeat rate in purchase and more than 40% conversion rate.
The startup also raised raised $10 Mn led by Lightspeed Venture Partners India and Lightspeed US in a Series A funding round in November 2016.
“We continue to be big believers in the team and market opportunity, and the company’s performance in terms of scale, growth dynamics, buyer/seller retention and frequency benchmarks to the best marketplace platforms we’ve seen globally,” said Lightspeed India Managing Director Bejul Somaia in a media statement as reported by Livemint.
The startup claims to have sellers in almost 80 cities and delivers in more than 500 cities.