Unilever Ventures-backed grocery delivery platform Milkbasket aims to touch a revenue run rate of Rs 200 crore by the next fiscal as it ramps up its operations and expands headcount.
According to a PTI report: The company, which was founded in 2015 and currently operates in Gurugram, competes with the likes of Grofers and Bigbasket.
“Hyper-local grocery delivery market is a huge opportunity. We started by catering to the Indian habit of getting fresh milk delivered at home every morning, and today has grown to become one of the leading grocery delivery platform in Gurugram,” Anant Goel, CEO, Milkbasket told PTI.
He added that the company’s average revenue run rate is expected to see a significant growth from about Rs 40 crore currently to about Rs 200 crore by March 2019. ‘Revenue run rate’ is a term used in online retailing to indicate total sales value of merchandise sold through the marketplace over a certain period of time.
“Milk is a large part of the cart but 60 per cent is non-milk products. We look at monthly wallet capture instead of average cart size (on a single transaction)… We want to be like a next door mom and pop store that caters to the everyday grocery needs of the customer,” he was further quoted by PTI as saying.
In January, the company had secured a US $3 million investment round, where Unilever Ventures, the venture capital and private equity arm of Unilever, had also participated. Milkbasket’s current investors include BLUME Ventures, Lenovo Capital (LCIH), Empower Investment, Hofan Capital, Draphant, and angel investors, including Peter Zou (CEO, YeahMobi) and Vinay Bansal (ex-CFO, Wildcraft), among others.
Goel said the investment is being deployed to strengthen technology at the back end as well as front end, expanding their assortment and customer base and monetising other streams of revenues.
“We are also significantly expanding our headcount from about 300 now to about 2,500 people in the next 12-18 months. These people would be primarily engaged on the delivery side. We are looking at making about 50,000 deliveries a day in the next year or so,” Goel told PTI.
Asked if the company will expand to other cities, Goel said the focus currently is on adding more locations within Gurugram. “We will look at expanding to other cities later,” he was further quoted by PTI as saying.
