Milkbasket Success Story - Hyperlocal Grocery Delivery App
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With a rising number of startups and the presence of many existing players in the industry, the customer acceptance of home delivery services is growing leaps and bounds. Living in the current era, we are surrounded by an increasing number of eCommerce platforms that offer almost everything and deliver all of these things right at our doorsteps.
It is true that most of our daily needs are satisfied by the old and the newer players that are dominating the home delivery services, but for some of our daily needs, which are always in demand, like fresh milk, groceries, we often find a crunch, even if it is for a specific product. This is why many startups have solely dedicated their businesses to meet the growing requirements, thereby aiming to achieve a demand-supply equilibrium. One such startup that aims to take care of the fresh supply of milk and more is Milkbasket.
Milkbasket is a subscription-based micro-delivery service that provides customers with the regular dairy necessities and household needs each morning. Within the first six months of its launch, Milkbasket claimed to have shipped 30 million orders.
Founded by Anant Goel, Anurag Jain, Ashish Goel, and Yatish Talavdia in 2015, Milkbasket is a Haryana-based company that is currently owned and operated by Reliance Industries, when the latter acquired 96.49% stakes in Aaidea Solutions Private Limited Milkbasket parent in October 2021.
Know more about Milkbasket's startup story, business model, funding, revenue, growth, and more in the article ahead!
Milkbasket - Company Highlights
| Startup Name | Milkbasket |
|---|---|
| Legal Name | Doorstep Retail Solutions Pvt Ltd |
| Headquarters | Gurugram, India |
| Industry | Delivery Services, E-Commerce, Food and Beverage |
| Founder | Anant Goel, Anurag Jain, Ashish Goel, Yatish Talavdia |
| Founded | 2015 |
| Revenue | $42.51 mn (INR 322 crore in FY2020) |
| Total Funding | $78.5 million (Feb 2021) |
| Parent Organization | Reliance Retail Ventures Limited |
| Website | milkbasket.com |
Milkbasket - Recent News
About Milkbasket and How it Works?
Milkbasket - Industry
Milkbasket - Name, Logo and Tagline
Milkbasket - Founders and Team
Milkbasket - Startup Story
Milkbasket - Vision and Mission
Milkbasket - Business Model
Milkbasket - Revenue and Growth
Milkbasket - Funding and Investors
Milkbasket - Competitors
Milkbasket - Challenges Faced
Milkbasket - Future Plans
Milkbasket - FAQs
Milkbasket - Recent News
October 23, 2021 - Reliance Industries' subsidiary Reliance Retail Ventures Ltd completes the acquisition of Milkbasket by acquiring 96.49% stakes in the company.
August 28, 2021 - Milkbasket, a daily grocery delivery app, has advanced its bid to go public in the second half of 2021, boosted by solid market growth in recent months despite the pandemic, according to a top company executive.
"Milkbasket has a near-perfect record of reaching growth targets since being founded in 2015. The rapid adoption of at-home grocery delivery amongst consumers due to the pandemic has provided us with an impetus to target IPO in just a year, which we had initially planned for the year 2023," Anant Goel (Milkbasket co-founder and CEO) said.
About Milkbasket and How it Works?
Milkbasket is a Gurugram-based company that creates an online grocery network to meet consumers' everyday household needs.
The company provides a simple delivery system that delivers milk, bread, eggs, butter, juices, and other everyday necessities and basic dairy amenities to users' doorsteps every morning. The platform also allows them to keep track of daily expenditures, schedule vacation time off, and easily build repeat orders every day.
Varad Kitey
Milkbasket - Industry
The Covid-19 pandemic has created a huge growth opportunity for the online grocery delivery sector, which predicted that India's online grocery market could reach $3 billion in 2020, up from $1.7 billion in 2019. It is expected to grow at a CAGR of 37.1% from 2021 to 2028. The industry was valued at USD 2.9 billion in 2020. It has gained tremendous traction since 2020.
Milkbasket - Name, Logo and Tagline
'Milkbasket' as the name suggests, was a milk delivery startup initially but later on decided to come up with a simple delivery system that delivers milk, bread, eggs, butter, juices, and other everyday necessities and basic dairy amenities to users'.
Milkbasket - Founders and Team
Milkbasket was founded by Anant Goel, Anurag Jain, Ashish Goel, and Yatish Talavdia in 2015.
Anant Goel
Anant V Goel was the founder and CEO of Milkbasket. Goel was a B.tech, Civil Engineering student of NIT Kurukshetra, after which he visited The Wharton School and INSEAD to complete MBA exchange and MBA, Strategy and Operations, Corporate Finance programs. Goel started his career at Tata Consultancy Services where he worked as a Project Leader and then went to Capgemini to join the company as a Sr. Strategy and Transformation Consultant. Goel then became the CEO and Managing Partner of UrSqft before founding Milkbasket and becoming its CEO. Gallup Consulting was another company where Anant Goel worked as an Associate Partner. Goel exited the company and stepped down from the CEO designation on August 23, 2021, after Milkbasket was acquired by Reliance Industries.
Milkbasket Founder and former CEO Anant Goel  is all set to launch his new startup that will be based on the fruits and vegetable segment. It would be a consumer-centric platform that will delivery the fresh produce from farmers to the consumers, as per the sources close to the company and to the matter, reported on February 15, 2022.
Anurag Jain
Anurag Jain has been a co-founder of Milkbasket.com. He was also an alumnus of NIT Kurukshetra from where he completed a B.Tech degree in Civil Engineering. Jain later successfully pursued a PGDBM in Operations Management and Supervision from XLRI Jamshedpur. Anurag became a co-founder of Milkbasket after serving managerial roles in several companies like Spencer's Retail, Cinepolis India, TPG Wholesale, and Samsung India. Â Â Â Â Â Â
Ashish Goel
Ashish Goel served as the Co-founder and CTO/CPO of Milkbasket. A Mechanical Engineering student of Delhi College of Engineering, Ashish co-founded two companies - Â Zamoona and UrSqFt before co-founding Milkbasket in 2015. Ashish Goel is currently serving as the CTO of ZipLoan after leaving Milkbasket in January 2021.
Yatish Talvadia
Yatish is currently hailed as the present CEO of Milkbasket after Anant exited the company. Talvadia has a Masters' degree in Engineering/Industrial Management from Manipal Institute of Technology. Yatish was the Sr. Lecturer of JECRC and later served as a Core Team Member of Zamoona before co-founding Milkbasket with the 3 other founders of the company. Â
Milkbasket - Startup Story
Ashish Goel availed of the 'Milk and More’ service to deliver groceries and daily necessities to his home when he was in the U.K. This made Anant realize that India also needs one such service. However, entering around that time when the market was already being dominated by successful players like Grofers, Big Basket, LocalBaniya, and Peppertap, Milkbasket had only one intention, which is to stand as an alternative to the mom-and-pop stores of every Indian neighborhood.
Milkbasket founders started in 2015 when they first set up a stall in an apartment complex in Gurugram. The founders soon got the first paying customer, who installed the app. The founding team of Milkbasket initially started to deliver milk by themselves, in their personal car. With the increasing demands, they eventually had to hire an autorickshaw to deliver it. The order volume further increased, which made Milkbasket partner with corporates and automotive companies and ultimately set up their own delivery fleet. Â Â
Milkbasket started off with just 22 customers in April 2015, and by the end of June of the same year, the team saw a growth of 30,000+ customers, and that too only in Gurugram. Ashish and Anant started with their initial capital seed of 50 Lacs.
Milkbasket - Vision and Mission
The company's mission is to become the default mom and pop shop for over a million households. Milkbasket is by far the most cost-efficient model in the online grocery space as compared to its domestic and global competitors, accomplishing positive unit economics within about six months of launch. This is perhaps why the company has been acquired by Reliance.
Devashish Shrivastava
Milkbasket - Business Model
Milkbasket is a hyperlocal e-commerce company that believes in an inventory-based model where it sources its products directly from brands. Milkbasket co-founder Anant Goel believes that his company has developed a contactless hyper-local grocery delivery model. Customers can place orders before midnight and have them shipped by 7 a.m., according to Milkbasket.
The e-grocery delivery startup doesn't need checkout or payment because the purchase is prepaid with the help of a mobile wallet that is on the app. Therefore, the users can simply top it up whenever they run out of funds. Milkbasket earns from its delivery charges, subscriptions, and commissions from each transaction.
Milkbasket - Revenue and Growth
Milkbasket, a hyperlocal distribution startup based in Gurugram, announced a 3.8X increase in revenue in 2020, which ended in March last year, with only a small increase in losses. In 2020, the company reported revenue of INR 322 crore, of which 99.9% (INR 321.7 crore) came from operations.
In 2020, the hyperlocal startup's expenses rose at the same pace, to INR 337.7 Cr, bringing its losses to INR 15.7 Cr. In 2019, the company posted revenue of INR 84.6 Cr and expenses of INR 94.1 Cr, resulting in a loss of INR 9.5 Cr. Over the same time frame, it received around 99.7% (INR 84.4 Cr) from its operations.
Milkbasket is based on the habit of people residing in India, of having milk delivered to one's doorstep every morning, and the company only delivers during one delivery slot, from 5 a.m. to 7 a.m. By October 2017 they had delivered around 1.5 million orders and employed around 200 people.
Milkbasket had earlier displayed an annual sales run rate of around USD 100 million, delivering over 9,000 items across FMCG, dairy, fruits, and vegetable categories in Indian cities including Hyderabad, Dwarka, Delhi, Bengaluru, Ghaziabad, Gurgaon, and Noida).
MbBulk and senior citizens-only helplines were also introduced in several cities to help people stay on lockdown without having to go out for groceries and dairy products. Within the first six months of its launch, Milkbasket successfully shipped around 30 million orders and achieved positive unit economics.
The company has been in high demand since the lockdown began, as demand for hyperlocal grocery delivery has increased dramatically. During the lockdown, many companies with a logistics and distribution backbone, such as Swiggy and Zomato, switched to grocery delivery as these were the only essentials in demand across the board.
Rishabh Rathi
Milkbasket - Funding and Investors
Over the course of 11 rounds of funding, Milkbasket has raised total funding of $78.5 million. Milkbasket's Investors' include InnoVen Capital, Inflection Point Ventures, Mayfield Capital, Kalaari Capital, Blume Ventures among others.
| Date | Round | Amount | Lead Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 23, 2021 | - | $40M | Reliance Retail |
| May 13, 2020 | Series B | $5.5M | Inflection Point Ventures |
| Jun 27, 2019 | Debt Financing | â‚ą150M | InnoVen Capital |
| Jun 4, 2019 | Series B | $10.5M | Unilever Ventures |
| Dec 19, 2018 | Series A | $7M | Mayfield Fund |
| Nov 12, 2018 | Series A | $100M | Mayfield Fund |
| May 22, 2018 | Series A | $7M | Kalaari Capital |
| Jan 23, 2018 | Seed Round | $3M | Unilever Ventures |
| Aug 23, 2017 | Seed Round | $840.9K | Blume Ventures, Lenovo Capital and Incubator Group (LCIG) |
| Dec 1, 2016 | Seed Round | $634.9K | — |
| Apr 26, 2016 | Seed Round | $500K | EVC Ventures |
Milkbasket - Competitors
The top competitors in Milkbasket's competitive set are -
- Supr Daily
- DailyNinja
- BB Daily
- Town Essentials
- Amshop
- RainCan
- ZopSmart
- PepperTap
- Big Basket
- Grofers
- Dunzo
- Zomato
- Swiggy and more.
Chayanika Goswami
Milkbasket - Challenges Faced
Though Milkbasket initially started fine with the capital pool from the founders, the app has faced money crunches in regular intervals, which has been one of the major challenges of the company. Milkbasket was ultimately acquired by Reliance Retail and two senior executives of Reliance Industries Limited – Nikhil K Chakrapani, CFO of Reliance Retail and Rajendra Kamath, CFO of Reliance Content Management have joined the board of directors of Milkbasket as additional directors.
Milkbasket - Future Plans
According to a top company executive, Milkbasket has advanced its intention to pursue an initial public offering by the second half of 2021, boosted by solid market growth in recent months despite the pandemic. The widespread adoption of at-home delivery services among shoppers during the coronavirus disease outbreak, according to Anant Goel, has opened an opportunity to target an IPO in less than a year.
"Milkbasket has a near-perfect record of reaching growth targets since being founded in 2015. The rapid adoption of at-home grocery delivery amongst consumers due to the pandemic has provided us with an impetus to target IPO in just a year, which we had initially planned for the year 2023," he said.
However, the company didn't manage to go public till now. Milkbasket is currently looking forward to expanding its range of offerings and is looking for profitability after being taken over by Reliance. The company is also deemed to be a part of the Reliance super app.
Shubham Kumar
Milkbasket - FAQs
What does Milkbasket do?
The company provides a simple delivery system that delivers milk, bread, eggs, butter, juices, and other everyday necessities and basic dairy amenities to users' doorsteps every morning.
Who founded Milkbasket?
Milkbasket was founded by Anant Goel, Anurag Jain, Ashish Goel and Yatish Talavdia in 2015.
What companies do Milkbasket compete with?
The top competitors in Milkbasket's competitive set are Supr Daily, DailyNinja, BB Daily, Town Essentials, Amshop, RainCan, ZopSmart, PepperTap, Big Basket, Grofers, Dunzo, Zomato and Swiggy.
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