One of the most famous online grocery and lifestyle products marketplaces, Grofers is an on-demand delivery service that connects consumers with local merchants in the neighbourhood. It offers a wide assortment of groceries, fruits & vegetables, electronics, cosmetics and much more in India.
The foundation of the Indian online grocery delivery service, Gofers was taken in December 2013 and is based out of Gurugram. Currently, It operates in 28 cities including Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune, Jaipur, and Chennai to name a few.
Although initially, creating new behaviour among users and suppliers was a tough task for the company. People used to make a trip to their local market for daily shopping.
But over a period of time, Gofers has managed to create trust among them and build a shift in their shopping behaviour. Another major challenge was to change the decades-old retail industry.
The team is continuously working to power all the merchants with technology so that they can manage their business better.
At present, the E-grocery platform claims to have a network of more than 6,000 partner stores on its platform and delivers more than 25 million products to customers in a month. Most of these products are sourced from more than 200 small and medium manufacturing enterprises in the country.
The primary USP of Grofers is that it delivers food products at low prices. They are introducing offline retailers online and customers get anything delivered from their favourite stores to their doorstep within minutes.
The name Grofers is a portmanteau of “grocery gophers”. Here, customers use a mobile application or company website to place their orders online. Grofers employees then secure the items from their warehouse and deliver them to the consumer.
Grofers was started by Saurabh Kumar and Albinder Dhindsa as a B2B delivery service that acted as a bridge between large sellers and local retail stores.
Later, Saurabh and Albinder realized that there was a significant gap between local stores and end customers. It mainly happened that local retails stores were busy attending to the home delivery needs of customers or sometimes they did not have the product the customer was looking for.
With an objective to tackle this issue, a new concept was formulated. It benefitted retail stores as well as customers; Grofers was launched as a B2C online marketplace. At the initial phase, the company was started with a very small team, but with time it has grown successfully.
In its user base, Grofers has registered a great growth rate with over 3 million app downfalls on iOS and Android.
In the year 2018, Grofers launched its membership/subscription-based services ‘Smart Bachat Club’, and has since received half a million subscribers. The people who become a member of this club, they can purchase their daily groceries by paying as low as to wholesale prices.
Grofers has added huge funds to its cart; it seems to be a part of its Series F funding drive. It bagged Rs 142.6 crore funding from Benett and Coleman Private Limited and an infusion of Rs 321 crore from its parent company in Singapore.
The E-grocery company secure over $200 million in Series F funding led by SoftBank Vision Fund. This round also includes the participation from a new investor, South Koren investment firm KTB, apart from its existing investors, Tiger Global Management and Sequoia Capital.
The company has also raised $10 million from Abu Dhabi-based entity Capital Investment LLC
To date, the Gurugram-based online platform has acquired three companies. In April 2015, it acquired Delhi-based MyGreenBox that was an app-based grocery delivery platform.
The acquisition allows Grofers to empower its position in the app-based grocery delivery market. In October 2015, it acquired Spponjoy, a food delivery app, and Townrush, a B2B logistics services.
The founder of Grofers, Saurabh Kumar had earlier worked at Rasilant Technology, as the COO. He finished his studies from IIT Bombay and the University of Texas at Austin.
Alibinder Dhinda is the co-founder and CEO of Grofers. He had earlier worked with Zomato as the Head of International Operations. He is an engineering graduate from IIT Delhi and he holds an MBA degree from Columbia Business School.
Technology and operations, being the core of its business, Grofers is focused to transform how people shop from stores around them. They aim to bring offline retailers online and support them to flourish and add new verticals to its business.
