Udaan, B2B online marketplace, has raised $50 million in series B round of investment led by Lightspeed US. The round also saw participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners India and funds associated with Russian investor Yuri Milner. To the fact, this is one of the largest known single series B investment in India. The company said it would use the funds to add more sellers and buyers, hire more on the technical and management side, and launch services like lending on the platform.
Udaan, founded by Sujeet Kumar, Vaibhav Gupta and Amod Malviya in 2016, enables an end-to-end marketplace, like Alibaba, offers logistics and has recently started alternative lending for buyers and sellers. The company further claims to have sellers in over 80 cities, with deliveries to more than 500 cities and an order average value around 6,000-7,000 INR. The founders of the company have been senior executives in Flipkart, in the past. Sujeet Kumar was the logistics head, Amod Malviya was the Chief Technology Officer and Vaibhav Gupta was the business finance chief.
“We’ve raised this round because we have validation that our product is working. The market opportunity is huge,” Sujeet Kumar said in a statement. He further pointed out to Udaan e-commerce’s contribution to its sellers overall business. “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,” he said, adding, “These metrics are big validation that there’s massive demand for our kind of end-to-end marketplace.”
According to a recent report, the B2B segment of the e-commerce industry in India is set to grow by two-and-a-half times and touch Rs 45 lakh crore. The report further added the global trends tell the same story, and is expected to reach the $6.7 trillion mark by 2030. Countries like USA, China and Japan have the highest stakes in the B2B marketplace business.