Milkbasket, India’s first daily micro-delivery grocery startup has secured an undisclosed amount from prominent investors Blume Ventures, Lenovo Capital and Incubator Group (LCIG). This is Milkbasket’s third round of funding. In December, a few Milkbasket customers together with Empower Investment, Hofan Capital and Draphant participated in their second round of funding. In April 2016, the company raised $500,000 in pre-Series A round led by EVC Ventures and Chinese Investors including Peter Zou, CEO of YeahMobi, and Li Jian, founder of Zhu Dao Investments. Snapdeal vice presidents Vikas Banga and Manav Kamboj also invested as well.

The funding will be utilized to expand operations in Gurgaon and hire critical manpower in technology, supply chain, and operations departments. EVC and certain angel investors, who initially invested in Milkbasket, are reported to have exited in this round.

“We have studied the inadequacies of the supply chain in groceries in depth and see a huge potential to add value at both supply and demand side”, said Anant Goel, Co-founder, and CEO of Milkbasket. “We hope this investment will help us fulfill our aim to simplify the currently fragmented supply chain and use technology to expand operations to cater to more societies in Gurgaon.”

Milkbasket, launched in early 2015, currently serves over 10,000 families across 115 societies in Gurgaon. Built on the unique Indian habit of getting fresh milk delivered at home every morning, Milkbasket is today fulfilling the entire grocery needs of a household before 7:00am every day. There is no minimum order and no delivery charges. An order can be placed by any member of the household till midnight and gets delivered to the doorstep early morning, every morning.

To enable frequent and frictionless buying, Milkbasket has introduced flexi-ordering and contactless delivery - both a first in the e-commerce industry - and favorites of Milkbasket customers.

"Anant and team at Milkbasket have understood the ingrained milkman habit in Indian homes, leveraged that simple habit, and taken the customer experience of getting any groceries home-delivered to an altogether new level. It's easy as getting morning papers! And in that simplicity lays the beauty of the model. We look forward to the partnership which will allow what's taken Gurgaon by storm to reach several other cities eventually." said Karthik Reddy, managing partner at Blume Ventures, a venture capital firm which has also invested in companies like OLA and GreyOrange.

Milkbasket has till date completed 1.5 million orders and controls the end to end user experience with a completely technology led in-house procurement and logistics model.

“The team at Milkbasket is doing a great job of eliminating the problems that exist in the on-demand grocery industry and we couldn’t be more excited about this collaboration”, said Jeffrey Wang, Managing Director of Lenovo Capital and Incubator Group (LCIG).

“By reducing the last mile logistics cost to a fraction of the industry (1/20th) and removing a real pain area of customers, Milkbasket has cracked the online grocery delivery model for India. We aspire to be serving a million families, every day, in the next 5 years and our belief is further solidified with this round of funding by two internationally recognized players” added Anant.

By perfecting the supply chain management, Milkbasket envisions a day when a customer will be able to order absolutely anything before midnight and get the delivery before 7 AM the next day.
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