Mumbai: Grofers, the online grocery store, has raised Rs 400 crore in a fresh round of funding led by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group.
Grofers on Friday said it would use the proceeds from the Series E funding to invest in building private labels and improving the supply chain.
Further, a major part of the investment will go towards building infrastructure and technology to achieve better penetration in cities which the firm serves.
A statement from the start-up said the other investors who have participated in the latest round of funding include Tiger Global and Apoletto Asia.
Grofers, so far, has raised $226.5 million in five rounds of cash infusion.
"This fresh round by our existing investors is a vote of confidence and trust in the turnaround at Grofers," Albinder Dhindsa, co-founder and CEO of Grofers, said while commenting on the development.
"We took some hard decisions to fix parts of the business that were not scaling well. Our efforts have clearly contributed in making sure we have a clear path to profitability as well as the largest market share in the online grocery segment; having grown four-fold in the last one year for monthly sales in excess of Rs 100 crore," Dhindsa added.
Grofers, which was founded by Saurabh Kumar and Dhindsa in 2013, has previously raised $166.5 million from investors such as SoftBank, Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global.
The company expects better days ahead as more customers get familiar with online grocery shopping. The online grocery market that touched $600 million in 2016 is estimated to have crossed $1 billion in size by the end of 2017.
According to Grofers, the company now clocks an average of 25,000 orders a day with an average order value of Rs 1400.
Grofers is now the largest online grocery player in North India, having already turned operationally profitable in Delhi NCR on a per-order basis.
Albinder said Grofers will look to build an enriched customer experience for its next 10 million grocery shoppers.
At present, the delivery service is operational in 13 cities, including Calcutta, Mumbai and Pune.
