The market for e-grocery (and other things needed for household cooking) is set for intense action. While Jio Mart and Reliance Retail, and Amazon are increasing their investments, the archrival, the Walmart-owned Flipkart is also creating ripples with its own moves.
To meet the increasing competition, Walmart and the Flipkart Group today announced a fresh round of investment in Ninjacart, a B2B supply chain infrastructure and technology solutions startup.
This is the second round of investment made in the same company by Walmart and the Flipkart Group. The first one was in December 2019.
This makes it clear that Walmart and Flipkart continue to focus on ensuring access to high quality fresh produce for consumers and retailers.
For Ninjacart, this will improve its offerings and enhance customer experience. Ninjacart has attracted well-known backers such as Tiger Global, Accel, Tanglin, Steadview, Syngenta, Nandan Nilekani and Qualcomm among others.
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Ninjacart, an expert in last-mile delivery
During the lockdown, Ninjacart demonstrated agility and innovation by launching a series of initiatives such as apartment delivery, including a ‘Farm to fork’ pilot with Flipkart, customer delivery through food delivery apps, ‘Harvest the Farms’ initiative, etc. in a week's time to help both customers and farmers.
Ninjacart had also launched ‘FoodPrint’ - a 100% traceability platform for its products during the lockdown to improve the food safety.
With Flipkart growing its Supermart (grocery) and Flipkart Quick (hyperlocal) businesses, Ninjacart will continue to play a key role in providing fresh produce to consumers across the country.
Ninjacart, a Flipkart press release said, has developed many indigenous solutions - it has built India’s low-cost last-mile network using an innovative network model coupled with data science. "Its less-than-12 hours connectivity from farm to store helps avoid the need for control temperature supply chain for perishable goods."
Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO, Flipkart Group, said, “The e-grocery market in India has seen tremendous growth over the past several months as people have increasingly taken to ordering groceries and fresh produce online. Our pilots and current business engagement with Ninjacart have been encouraging as we leverage technology to address changing consumer behaviour across the country.”
Commenting on the announcement Thirukumaran Nagarajan, CEO & Co-founder of Ninjacart said, “We are excited to have Walmart and the Flipkart Group show confidence in our capabilities around growth and profitability. We will continue to invest in areas that impact the lives of customers and farmers positively.”
In the coming months, Ninjacart will use the capital to expand to new markets and build new offerings and supply chains for emerging customer segments, even while continuing to innovate on the supply chain.
