Bengaluru-based hyperlocal delivery startup Dunzo said it had raised USD 28 million in its Series E funding round led by Google and impact investment firm LGT Lightstone Aspada.
Its regulatory filings show that in its first tranche of Series E round, Dunzo has already received USD 15.65 million from Google and Lightstone and is awaiting the rest of the money to come from its existing investors such as Pivot Ventures, Bhoruka Finance Corporation, 3L Capital, Moving Capital, and Lightbox.
This round of funding comes 10 months after it raised USD 45 million last year. It has raised a total of USD 88.4 million according to Crunchbase.
Dunzo started its journey as a WhatsApp group in 2015 by four engineering graduates Ankur Aggarwal, Dalvir Suri, Kabeer Biswas, and Mukund Jha. People could post their delivery requests for personal items like books, flowers, parcels, lunch boxes to be picked up from a location and get it delivered to another.
The platform quickly aroused the interest of users and when the order numbers soared up to 500 a day on WhatsApp, it built an app for delivery partners in 2016 so that it could streamline daily deliveries.
It was only in 2017, that the company launched its consumer-facing app where it started categorizing different products and types of deliveries. Soon, it partnered with neighborhood stores, medicine stores, and restaurants. According to local media Entrackr, Dunzo currently has around 75,000 stores on the platform and was delivering about 2.5 million deliveries before March.
Now it competes with Bigbasket, Grofers, Amazon, Zomato, and Swiggy, which started Dunzo-like sundry and grocery deliveries in November last year with the launch of Swiggy Stores and Swiggy Go.
According to Forrester Research, India’s e-grocery industry is pegged to reach about USD 35.5 billion by the end of this year. Walmart-owned e-tailer Flipkart and JioMart, the digital venture of India’s largest conglomerate Reliance, have also entered this space, further stirring up the competition in this space.
