- India’s Grofers Grabs $120M To Bring Offline Merchants Into The On-Demand World: The race for on-demand delivery services in India is on, and today one of the bigger startups in the market has picked up a large cash injection as it goes for pole position. Grofers, an Instacart-style app that links up with local, offline merchants to delivery groceries, medicine, flowers, and other daily items to customers, has raised $120 million led by new investor SoftBank. The Series C round also included existing backers DST’s Apoletto Managers, Tiger Global and Instacart investor Sequoia Capital. Grofers CEO and co-founder Albinder Dhindsa and SoftBank have both directly confirmed the round and investors to TechCrunch. Grofers has been on a fundraising tear to aid its expansion. This is the third round raised by the company this year alone, after earlier rounds of $10 million and $35 million. It brings the total to just under $166 million including an earlier seed round. Japan’s Softbank has been pouring hundreds of millions of dollars of investment into Indian startups like Ola, Snapdeal and more, and as part of this round it will take a seat on Grofers’ board. The Times of India, which first reported the raise, cites sources that say Grofers now has a post-money valuation of over $300 million. Dhindsa, who cofounded the company with Saurabh Kumar, would not comment on the valuation and said he hadn’t even wanted to make this fundraise public. “Very honestly it’s just a distraction for the team,” he told TechCrunch. “We’re in the middle of trying to build a business.” Today, that business is currently live in 26 cities in India, with some 1.6 million downloads of the mobile apps that are used to order its services. While Grofers looks on the surface like another Instacart clone, there is more going on under the hood. The company originally started as a B2B provider of a supply chain platform it built to help larger brands distribute consumables to smaller merchants, and for those smaller merchants who are almost completely offline to better keep track of their stock. “In India, retail is very unorganised, so we see an opportunity in helping small merchants come online,” Dhindsa says. Still, perhaps to tap into a more mass market prospect, it recently pivoted — or expanded may be the more accurate term — to make its business more consumer-facing, by offering those small, offline businesses an additional service: a way of showing their stock to consumers, who can order and have items delivered. Typically, Grofers offers some features to businesses for free, such as its inventory management system. It then takes a cut on other business software and services, as well as on the delivery, which can range at prices to consumers of between $1 for groceries to $0.40 for medicines (not as cheap sounding in India as it may be in the U.S.). Dhindsa says that the funding will be used to continue growing its supply-chain management development, but also to continue building out its last-mile infrastructure. Today, Grofers uses a mix of its own employees and contractors to deliver goods. Perhaps cleverly, it has chosen not to make delivery the cost-and-profit focus of its whole operation. In fact, it’s even considered partnering with others for that aspect of its business.
- Thanksgiving Online Sales Stats: Growth Higher Than Rest of Year As Importance of Holiday Season Sales Rises: Thanksgiving is now in full swing in the U.S., and while many are focused on food and football, some are turning their attention online to kick off their holiday shopping. Adobe, which has tracked 100 million visits to some 4,500 retail sites so far today (including 80% of all online transactions from the top 100 U.S. retailers), says that over $1 billion has been spent so far online, and that the final figure is on track to be $1.7 billion — growth of 22% compared to Thanksgiving a year ago, with Star Wars being one of the big brands driving sales. “Thanksgiving Day online sales continue to trend ahead of expectation as we head into the evening hours, when mobile shopping comes back into the mix,” said Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst, Adobe Digital Index. “We expect the day to come in up 22% YoY at over $1.7 billion, driven by stronger than expected toy sales due to Star Wars items and much higher shopping via email promotions (+25% YoY).” Meanwhile, IBM — which also tracks sales across thousands of websites in the U.S. — is publishing real-time numbers showing how people are buying online. As of 3 PM Pacific time today, the average value per order has been $142.55. As a point of comparison, a year ago, IBM said the average order value was $125.25; and in 2013, it was $132. IBM says that online sales the day before Thanksgiving were up by 35% compared to the same day a year ago, with average value per order up by $9.10. (As comparison, U.S. e-commerce sales overall are only expected to go up by 14% this year compared to last, so 35% is high). Taken together, yesterday’s and today’s numbers indicate not only that more more of us are shopping online, but we are spending more in the process. We’ll have to see how those numbers bear out over the next days and weeks before saying whether this is a sign of people getting in early and dropping off, or whether this is a bellwether for a strong season overall. Overall, the period is projected to bring in between $70 billion $95 billion in e-commerce sales. Yesterday, comScore published some numbers predicting that mobile would account for less than 17% of all sales in November and December ($11.7 billion out of $70 billion); but that it would represent nearly all the growth. IBM’s numbers today so far are actually improving on those projections. It says that just under 28% of all sales are being made on mobile devices. And mobiles are also account for just under half (48%) of all e-commerce traffic — that is, browsing for goods if not buying outright. Adobe, on the other hand, is reporting slightly lower numbers for mobile. It says that $283 million in sales have come mobile devices so far this Thanksgiving, with smartphones accounting for 15% of that and tablets 11%. Adobe says this is a big leap over last year’s 18% but actually lower than the 29% it had expected “but will pick up again during Thanksgiving dinner time.”
