India’s Morning Grocery Service Milkbasket Eyes Profitability In 2020, Raises $5.5M

Online grocery delivery service Milkbasket has landed $5.5 million in venture capital in a round led by Inflection Point Ventures. That brings the funding pulled in by Milkbasket to over $33 million.

Milkbasket, launched in 2015, calls itself a micro-delivery service. It delivers milk, bread, eggs, butter, juices and many other items “every morning, right at your doorstep,” with no delivery service fee.

India-based Inflection was joined in the funding round by existing investors Blume Ventures, Kalaari Capital, Mayfield India, Unilever Ventures and BeeNext, according to Live Mint.

Milkbasket said it now offers flexible ordering and frequent, contactless delivery.

“This is probably our last fundraise on our path to profitability — that we target to achieve in 2020,” said Milkbasket Co-Founder and CEO Anant Goel. “Our Gurgaon, Noida and Bengaluru operations are already breaking even with other cities on an accelerated track.”

The new funding, announced on Monday (June 22), will meet Milkbasket’s needs for “necessary buffers to deal with any eventualities,” the CEO said.

Milkbasket now delivers over 9,000 products, including fruits and vegetables. It now operates in the Indian cities of Gurugram, Noida, Dwarka, Ghaziabad, Hyderabad and Bengaluru.

“Milkbasket has a very lean delivery model, using the milk-run concept that enables them to run a very efficient and cost-effective supply chain,” said Vinay Bansal, founder and CEO of Inflection Point Ventures. “This will help them become profitable very soon — and first among the various competitive players in the market,” he said.

In separate news regarding commerce in India, Amazon India has expanded its Amazon Flex delivery network to 35 cities across the country. The eCommerce leader said it expects to create tens of thousands of part-time opportunities in the Amazon Flex communities.

The expansion comes at a time when India has gone through lockdowns as part of the fight against the coronavirus. Amazon said the expansion of the Flex program will assist the company’s Indian delivery network at a time when customers depend on its services to have their products delivered safely.