Daily Ninja, a mobile app that delivers daily needs on a subscription model, has raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from TaxiForSure (TFS) co-founder Aprameya Radhakrishna and other investors.
FindYogi’s Naman Sarawagi, Delyver’s Afsal Salu and six other angel investors also put money in the Bangalore-based hyperlocal delivery startup, as per a press statement.
Daily Ninja, run by Daily Ninja Delivery Services Pvt Ltd, will use the capital to expand operations within Bangalore and set up warehouses across the city. It currently operates in Marathahalli and Mahadevapura areas of Bangalore.
"The daily needs market is a subscription based one. The target audience is huge and yet this vital market is untapped. Team Daily Ninja has come up with a perfect solution to deal with this highly unorganised sector,†said Radhakrishna.
Daily Ninja delivers milk, bread, eggs, curd, dosa batter, paneer and water cans between 5 am and 8 am. The startup employs eight staffers and claims to get at least 500 daily orders.
Daily Ninja was launched four months ago by Sagar Yarnalkar and Anurag Gupta, who were batch-mates at BITS Pilani, Goa. Both were earlier associated with , a Mumbai-based mobile services firm. Yarnalkar was also a co-founder at Scoot. Gupta had earlier worked at Goldman Sachs.
“Daily needs like milk are critical every morning for a household and it is extremely important to have timely delivery as one’s schedules depend on these items,†Yarnalkar said.
The hyperlocal grocery and food ordering segment has seen the emergence of a bunch of startups. Indeed, firms such as Grofers, Peppertap, LocalBanya, Myonsto and iOrderFresh have also raised money. Most of these are aggregators who essentially provide an online platform to order from local vendors.
The biggest in the e-grocery segment is BigBasket, which raised $50 million from Bessemer Venture Partners and others a couple of months ago. It has an inventory-based model. In April this year, Grofers obtained $35 million from existing investors Tiger Global Management and Sequoia Capital.
Not just small startups, but major horizontal e-commerce players have also been trying to grab a significant portion of this promising market. Recently, Paytm’s parent company One97 Communication Ltd launched a new app named Zip to connect users to both offline as well as online grocers. Snapdeal has tied up with gourmet food retailer Godrej Nature’s Basket to sell about 400 of its products online.
In July, cab aggregator Ola launched its hyperlocal delivery app Ola Store for 13 product categories including groceries, fruits and vegetables, dairy products, health supplements and medicines.