Two year old B2B startup, Udaan, has become the fastest unicorn in India after raising $225 million from Yuri Milner’s DST Global and Lightspeed.
The B2B e-commerce marketplace connects manufacturers, wholesalers, traders, and retailers. This is the third institutional round for the Delhi-based startups since its inception in 2016.
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Udaan was launched 26 months back by three ex-Flipkart executives Sujeet Kumar, Vaibhav Gupta, and Amod Malviya. It raised $50 million in a Series B funding in February 2018, led by existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Yuri Milner, one of Russia’s most influential tech investor and entrepreneur.
Earlier in November 2016, it had raised $10 million in series A funding from Lightspeed India and Lightspeed US.
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The valuation of Udaan witnessed a four-fold increase as the previous two rounds (Series A and Series B) raised at a valuation of $40 million and $220 million respectively, the Times of India reported. Overall B2B market in India is expected to be around $700 billion by 2020, according to an April 2016 report by the Confederation of Indian Industry and Deloitte.
As of February 2018, Udaan had a seller base across 80 cities and delivering to more than 500 cities with an average order value between Rs 6000 -7000. Retailers and manufacturers can grow their network by exploring each other business profile, catalog, build connections powered by payments and logistics facility on the platform. The company has also started underwriting loans for this small businesses.
Other unicorns in India including foodtech, edtech and others, in India took a long time to get the coveted status of Unicron, Udaan has taken a giant leap and proved the potential of the B2B wholesale marketplace where ShopX, Power2SME, OfBusiness, Jumbotail, StoreKing, and Snapbizz, are some notable players.
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