Udaan raises $280 million in additional financing from new, existing investors

Udaan, a business-to-business marketplace, on Wednesday announced raising $280 million in additional financing from its new and existing investors. The existing investors of Udaan - Lightspeed Venture Partners, DST Global, GGV Capital, Altimeter Capital, and Tencent – participated in the funding exercise. New investors are Octahedron Capital and Moonstone Capital. The additional financing takes the overall fund raised by Udaan to $1.15 billion so far.

Udaan said that the additional funds will be invested in “continued market creation” of B2B e-commerce in India. It will also make efforts to reach out to more and small businesses across the country.

“Some of the key areas of investment will be: continued expansion of selection of products and categories available on udaan, furthering user experience, enhancing technology platform, expanding our SME financing capabilities and reinforcement of the supply-chain infrastructure,” the company said in a release.

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Udaan describes itself as India’s largest B2B e-commerce platform. Its operations are across categories including lifestyle, electronics, home & kitchen, staples, fruits and vegetables, FMCG, pharma, toys and general merchandise. The company also focuses on small manufacturers, farmers and brands to market and sell their products across the country.

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Udaan has been co-founded by three Flipkart veterans Sujeet Kumar, Amod Malviya and Vaibhav Gupta. It was registered as Hiveloop Technology Private Limited in 2016, according to CrunchBase. It is also India’s one of the few unicorns. The startup had raised $585 million in October 2019.

“Covid-19 has accelerated the already fast digital-led evolution of highly fragmented and unorganized Indian trade/ retail industry. While at the same time, the pandemic also highlighted unique structure of Indian economy, with millions of kiranas and neighbourhood stores becoming the lifeline of our country at the time of crisis. udaan is at the forefront of this uniquely Indian eCommerce opportunity, emerging in the last 4 years as one of the largest eCommerce platforms in India, while taking an India-first mobile-first approach to eCommerce. This financing enables us to further our journey of taking eCommerce to the depth and breadth of the country, with udaan’s unique low-cost model for core middle India,” said Amod Malviya, Co-founder, Udaan in the release.