With An Incredible Growth, The 10-minute Groceries Delivery App Zepto Has Raised $100 Million
In its Series C funding, Zepto - the grocery delivery app, has raised $100 million, increasing its overall market value to $570 million currently. The 10-minute grocery delivery company has initiated the quick commerce or q-commerce segment and is keen on taking its vision to new heights of success.
Mumbai-based q-commerce Zepto was founded by two Stanford University dropouts who have led the company into earning a fresh round of funding led by Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund. The recent development in Zepto follows a series of deals and investment announcements in the thriving buzzing q-commerce segment.
How will the funds be utilized?
Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund has led to a fresh funding round where new and existing investors have equally contributed. The investors evolved into the fundings are
Glade Brook, Nexus, Breyer Capital, Lachy Groom, Global Founders Capital, and Contrary Capital. The new budget is the consequent development from its last fundraiser announcement of $60 million made in November 2021.
In a company statement from Zepto, it is said, “The company has valued leadership from renowned companies including Flipkart, Uber, Dream11, Pharmeasy, PepperFry, and Amazon – to name a few. With the fresh injection of capital, Zepto feels encouraged to expand coverage across multiple cities in India and empower its team rapidly as the company is currently hiring across all functions, including operations, supply chain, marketing, finance, product, engineering, and human resources.
Defining q-commerce model
The economic disruptions caused by the pandemic have embarked onto a new sub-vertical of online grocery segments called Quick Commerce or q-commerce, where a prompt delivery of groceries adds a unique proposition into the serviceability. The vision is based on setting up micro-warehouses located closer to the point of delivery and restricting the stocks at the ‘dark stores’ to a focused set of highly-demandable products. The idea has sprouted up on the background of twisting the traditional formula of well-stocked large-format warehouses located in the different locations of cities and towns.
The Thriving Pace of Q-commerce
Q-commerce is making its way as the major contributor of the eCommerce industry as many companies, including the Zomato-based online grocery delivery Grofers, newly relaunched as Blinkit, have announced to rebrand itself a conventional e-grocer by opting for the q-commerce model in 2021.
Albinder Dhindsa, the company’s founder and CEO of Grofers, in his Twitter post, wrote, “The company will temporarily stop serving all other areas where they are not able to offer deliveries within 10 minutes. The new version is going to impact the company’s business size and for a large number of customers on an everyday basis.”
Swiggy, the food-tech platform, announced an investment of $700 million into its q-commerce vertical Instamart and plans to make 15-minutes deliveries by expanding its network of dark stores, near to their major customer base, from 2022.
The Mexican wave of q-commerce is enticing to many other market players, including Fraazo, the Mumbai-based D2C brand in the fresh fruits and vegetable space, which will be tripling the number of its dark stores to 750 by June-July 2022. Dunzo, Big Basket, backed by the Tata Group, has extended to the Tata Neu super app, looking ahead to initiate full-scale operations in the q-commerce space.