E-grocery unicorn, Grofers has rebranded itself to Blinkit, as the company places big bets on the quick commerce or 10-minute grocery delivery space, company founder Albinder Dhindsa wrote in a blogpost.
The rebranding comes just months after the company pivoted to 10-minute groceries earlier in August this year, and initially launched the service across the top 12 Indian cities.
“Once upon a time, a few months ago, we started on a journey to build the future of commerce with 10-minute delivery of most of the stuff our customers need in their daily lives. Today, we already process over a million orders a week, across 12 cities in India. And this is just a start,” said Dhindsa in a company blog.
“We learnt a lot as Grofers, and all our learnings, our team, and our infrastructure is being repurposed to pivot to something with staggering product-market fit – quick commerce. Today, we are surging ahead as a new company, and we have a new mission statement – “instant commerce indistinguishable from magic”. And we will no longer be doing this as Grofers – we will be doing it as Blinkit,” wrote Dhindsa.
Grofers had recently attained unicorn status or $1 billion in valuation, after raising over $120 million from food aggregator Zomato Ltd. and existing investor Tiger Global Management as a part of an ongoing raise, earlier this year.
To ramp up its quick commerce offering across multiple cities, the company was partnering with local store owners and following a ‘dark store strategy’ dedicated towards online e-commerce deliveries.
Local merchants were putting in their own investment to set up these stores with Grofers helping finance some of these merchants, Dhindsa told Mint in an earlier interaction.
Now, the company faces tough competition from foodtech giant Swiggy, which is focussing on 15-minute delivery through its Instamart offering, and quick grocery delivery startup, Zepto which is ramping up its play in the space.
Earlier this month, Swiggy, which is in the midst of raising a larger funding round, said that it will invest $700 million in its express grocery delivery service Instamart as it looks to double down on non-food delivery categories.
