Bangalore-based Udaan — a business-to-business e-commerce marketplace, has announced that it has secured around Rs 324 crore ($50 million) in its new Series B funding round. With this, the round is touted as one of the biggest early-stage funding round in Indian startup ecosystem.
This new Series B funding round saw participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Lightspeed India and DST Global founder Yuri Milner’s personal investment vehicle Apoletto. As a part of this funding round, Ravi Mhatre from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Bejul Somaia from Lightspeed India have been involved in the transaction and Bejul Somaia has also become a part of Udaan’s board.
The company will use the newly raised funding to add new sellers and buyers, expand its logistics network, hire more engineers and sales executives to its team and to launch new services, such as lending.
In a statement, Lightspeed India Managing Director Bejul Somaia said, “we continue to be big believers in the team and market opportunity, and the company’s performance in terms of scale, growth dynamics, buyer/seller retention and frequency benchmarks to the best marketplace platforms we’ve seen globally.”
The company was founded in 2016 by three former senior executives at Flipkart — Sujeet Kumar, Vaibhav Gupta, and Amod Malviya. It claims to have grown tremendously since its formal launch in June 2017 with a seven-time monthly repeat rate of purchase and more than 40% conversion rate.
Udaan runs a web platform connecting SMBs, manufacturers, wholesalers, traders, and retailers. It currently functions in only two categories — mobile accessories and fashion products. The startup says that it has sellers across 80 cities and and is delivering products to more than 500 cities. It further adds that the average order value lies between Rs 6,000 to Rs 7,000.
According to a 2016 report from Confederation of Indian Industry and Deloitte, the overall B2B market size is expected to be around $700 billion by the year 2020.