Delhi-based business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce and supply chain platform MaxWholesale has raised $1 million (around Rs 6.4 crore) in its pre-Series A funding round led by Indian Angel Network (IAN) and existing investor Maple Capital Advisors, it said in a statement.
From IAN, Ambarish Raghuvanshi, Raman Roy and Sunil Munjal, amongst others, invested. Lead IAN investor Raghuvanshi will join MaxWholesale’s board.
Bikky Khosla of Tradeindia as well as Pankaj Karna and Abhinav Grover of Maple Capital Advisors also participated in the round, the firm said.
The startup plans to use the funds to fuel tech innovation and growth, it said.
Last year in July, the firm raised Rs 1 crore (around $150,000) in a seed round from Maple Capital Advisors.
Owned by 99 Algorithms Pvt. Ltd, MaxWholesale was co-founded in May 2016 by Samarth Agrawal and Rohit Narang. The startup supplies products directly from companies to mom-and-pop stores across the country. It has developed a self-operated e-commerce platform to connect FMCG companies directly with small kirana stores. With the use of GPS-based routeing algorithms, MaxWholesale claims to create dynamic replenishment routes every day. It helps reduce time to delivery from the current one to two weeks to less than 24 hours, enabling quick refill of stock keeping units (SKUs) for retailers and cutting inventory cost. Its automation engine also captures and processes complete trade data at each level.
MaxWholesale is powering the online wholesale process for more than 90 FMCG companies, including Cadbury, Dabur, Patanjali, Capital Foods, P&G and HUL.
The firm is currently working with more than 1000 retailers in Delhi. With the latest funding round, the company plans to scale up operations and cater to more than 10,000 retailers.
“There are more than 7 million stores in India and the packaged consumer goods market in the country is worth more than $40 billion. MaxWholesale is leveraging the power of technology to explore this opportunity," said Raman Roy, co-founder and board member of IAN.
“FMCG retail in India is highly fragmented with 92% of the segment being run by family-owned mom-and-pop stores. Currently, wholesale accounts for 50% of the packaged good supply to kirana stores as distributors struggle to service the fragmented market,†said Agrawal.
With the changing dynamics in the post GST environment, the organised players are set to reap advantage, he said.