DailyNinja Raises Pre Series A Round of Funding

DailyNinja is a subscription based hyperlocal platform, for managing and ordering everyday essentials. DailyNinja has already become an established player within their segment and currently delivers to more than 6000 households everyday within Bangalore. Their unique model has shown sustainable unit economics along with a huge scale across the complete customer base.

DailyNinja was founded by BITS Pilani graduates Sagar Yarnalkar and Anurag Gupta. Both of them are serial entrepreneurs and were previously co-founders at Appspire technologies, a Mumbai based mobile services company.

They have raised a Pre series A round of funding led by Venk Krishnan (NuVentures) who is an existing investor from their previous round.
Other key investors in the round include, Aprameya Radhakrishna (Founder of TFS), Anupam Mittal (shaadi.com and People Group), Kunal Shah of Freecharge, Tracxn Labs, Subramanya SV (ex-Partner BVP), Ravi Garkipati (EIR and SVP at Flipkart) apart from several other highly connected Indian and Singapore based investors. The round was raised using the LetsVenture platform and TracxnSyndicate.

The funds invested will be utilized primarily to upgrade operations and expand the customer base.

Lead investor Venk Krishnan says “The DailyNinja team has figured out a unique highly scalable and efficient delivery model of daily household products to millions of households. They have scaled up to a significant volume in a very short time - I truly believe in their vision and execution capability.”

DailyNinja’s conception stems from founders’ personal experience when trying to order groceries online. Waiting for groceries to be delivered to their place, delivery timings overlapping with office hours, co-ordination with the delivery personnel and the dependency on grocery shops for smaller purchases owing to minimum order criteria in all online options made them realise there was a problem that needed to be solved. DailyNinja was thus conceptualised to give its customers the easiest, hassle free ordering experience ideally suited to high frequency ordering of household needs with a prepaid subscription based model.

Home delivery of household essentials is a complex business, with low margins and high delivery costs involved. Much of the customers requirements are recurring and subscription based. It is a high volume game which requires an asset light approach and optimisation through technology wherever possible. Many companies in similar sectors are struggling due to excessive delivery and maintenance costs, on the other hand DailyNinja has shown scale, hand in hand with sensible economics. Currently present in Bangalore and are fulfilling more than 6000 orders per day.

There are a lot of players in this space who claim they are not scaling as to get unit economics right. They actually have the wrong model that will fall apart with scale. They are running a local kirana shop model in illusion of a hyperlocal tech startup.

“This is a new market and we want as many good hands as possible to build this,” says Sagar Yarnalkar, co-Founder and CEO of DailyNinja.

“This is a new market and we want as many good hands as possible to build this. There are few players with similar model that have come up in the last 2-3 months, mostly when the buzz around our round spread.”

What differentiates DailyNinja from the rest?

“Our model is unique. We build upon dense customer bases by focusing on certain pockets of the city ensuring high efficiency in our delivery process. Our current cost per delivery is Rs.3 which will cut down to half as we grow. Scheduled deliveries in morning also help us move fast and avoid traffic while having 100% fulfilment. Subscription based daily deliveries ensure we reach your home everyday, thus implying that returns can be easily picked up the next day at no cost. As our model has the backbone of subscriptions, we have next to zero churn and unbelievable user engagement statistics. A customer opens the app 4 times a week on an average mostly leading to transactions.”

“As mentioned earlier, since our model is unique, traditional ecommerce metrics don’t apply to us. We have a very different set of metrics that govern us. For instance, a regular online grocer would want you to order as many apples as possible in one order, while we encourage you to order everyday, and eat fresh everyday.” adds Sagar.