India’s first online grocery store Bigbasket, around eight years after launch, has joined the elite club of startups in India with a valuation of $1 billion or more. Bigbasket, which had so far raised $885.7 million in 13 rounds, as per deals tracker Crunchbase, hit a whopping $2.28 billion valuation with the latest $150 million fundraising from Alibaba, the UK’s CDC Group and South Korea’s Mirae Asset Global Investments, as per regulatory filings sourced by business signals platform Paper.vc. Bigbasket, endorsed by Shah Rukh Khan as its brand ambassador, competes with Softbank-backed Grofers, Amazon Pantry, and Walmart-owned Flipkart’s Supermart.
Mirae Asset made maximum contribution to the round with $59.8 million followed by $50 million investment from Alibaba, and $40 million that came from CDC Group.
“Following this Series F investment led by Alibaba, our estimate of the post-money valuation of Bigbasket is $2.28 billion,” Vivek Durai, Founder, Paper.vc told Financial Express Online.
Bigbasket is the first Indian startup in the grocery space to turn unicorn. Earlier this month, e-commerce logistics startup Delhivery achieved the unicorn status with $413 million funding led by SoftBank Vision Fund.
Also read: Delhivery leading e-commerce logistics market is not a winner-takes-all game, says expert
Bigbasket alloted an “aggregate of 100 equity shares of the company of face value Re 1 per share for an issue price of $11.43, aggregating to a consideration of Rs equivalent of $1,142.86 and $1,312, 490 Series F compulsorily convertible preference shares,” the documents showed.
Bigbasket was last valued at reportedly around $800 million when it raised $300 million in February last year led by Alibaba.
The company has been able to retain a dominant lead over its rival Grofers that was started just two years later — 2013.
Bigbasket added more than Rs 1,000 crore in revenue in FY18 to Rs 1,605 crore from Rs 580 crore in FY16 vis-a-vis merely around Rs 40 crore added by Grofers to its FY16 revenue of Rs 14.3 crore to take it to Rs 53.5 crore mark in FY18, showed regulatory filings sourced by Paper.vc.
Interestingly, despite the massive gap between the revenues of two startups, started almost around the same time, Bigbasket has managed to contain its losses to Rs 310 crore in FY18. This is quite comparable to Rs 258 crore losses posted by Grofers in the same fiscal year.
The fall in losses is marginal from FY17 as Grofers cut losses by Rs 10 crore from Rs 268 crore in FY17 while Bigbasket narrowed the amount by around Rs 3 crore from Rs 313 crore.
