B2B Marketplace Udaan Raises $50M in Series B Led by Lightspeed Venture Partners
Udaan, an online marketplace for businesses, has raised $50 million in a fresh round of funding led by existing investor Lightspeed Venture Partners US, with an aim to accelerate expansion.
Another existing shareholder, Lightspeed India, as well as funds associated with Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, also participated in the round, which is one of the largest Series B funding rounds raised by any Indian start-up.
In November 2016, Udaan, had raised $10 million in series A funding from Lightspeed India and Lightspeed US.
Udaan will use the new funding to add new sellers and buyers, expand its logistics network, hire more engineers and sales executives and launch new services like lending, co-founder Sujeet Kumar said.
The Bengaluru-based company is an end-to-end marketplace that connects businesses in consumer goods, fashion and electronics, offers logistics services and has recently started lending. With sellers across 80 cities, it delivers to more than 500 cities and will expand to more areas with the new capital. Its average order value is between Rs 6,000 and Rs 7,000.
“We’ve raised this round because we have validation that our product is working. The market opportunity is huge and in just 15 months of launching, we’ve reached more than 500 cities. 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,” Kumar said.
Udaan was launched in November 2016 by Kumar, Vaibhav Gupta and Amod Malviya, former senior executives at Flipkart, India’s most valuable start-up. At Flipkart, Kumar was logistics head, Malviya was chief technology officer and Gupta was business finance chief.
