Business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce platform Jumbotail Technologies Pvt Ltd has raised $85 million (around Rs 640 crore) in its Series C funding round led by Artal Asia Pte Ltd, an affiliate of the US-based Invus Group, the company said on Tuesday.
Ajax Capital, the family office of entrepreneur Ajay Gupta, also participated in the round. Ajay Gupta is the Managing Director of fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) company Capital Foods Pvt Ltd.
This Series C funding round was a combination of primary and secondary investments, the company said. Nexus Venture Partners and Kalaari Capital partially exited the company with new investors coming in, the company said in a statement.
The latest fundraise takes the total capital raised by the company to $125 million, it added.
According to data on VCCEdge, the data and research platform of VCCircle, Kalaari Capital held a 12.97% stake in Jumbotail before the latest transaction, while Nexus Venture Partners owned a 26.58% stake.
Jumbotail said it will use the funds to triple its engineering, product, design, data science, category management, marketing, and finance teams. Jumbotail will also scale its core B2B marketplace to 100 cities and towns across India, and expand network of its ‘J24’ stores, the company said.
The company will also invest in skill development initiatives for kirana store owners, and further enhance its go-to-market services to support FMCG brands, it added.
Jumbotail was founded in 2015 by S Karthik Venkateswaran and Ashish Jhina. Venkateswaran had served the Indian army in hard combat and had previously worked with tech-platforms like eBay and Flipkart. Jhina, meanwhile, was a consultant with the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and has experience agricultural production and supply chains.
“We nearly quadrupled our scale in 2021 and are looking to further accelerate our growth trajectory in the coming year. We will continue to invest aggressively to make Jumbotail for food and grocery brands to reach the overwhelming majority of India’s consumers through our pan-India network of kirana partners,” said Jhina.
Jumbotail says it has connected approximately 2,000 FMCG and food staple brands and sellers to nearly 150,000 kirana stores across 38 cities and towns in India through its warehousing, logistics supply chain network and B2B e-commerce platform. The company said its new retail platform enables kirana stores to transform into omni-channel convenience grocery stores under the J24 brand within 24-48 hours.
The platform offers the kirana retailers a full suite of retail operating system for digitising in-store operations with point-of-sale (POS), inventory management, real time data and merchandising insights, daily fulfillment of products, a business-to-consumer (B2C) online store and loyalty and digital marketing solutions to enable them to connect with their consumers.
According to Jumbotail, size of the unorganised retail market, which has nearly 14 million kirana stores, is more than $500 billion.
Earlier this year, the company had raised Rs 35 crore from Alteria Capital in a venture debt round to expand its operations across India.
In January, Jumbotail had raised $14.2 million in a funding round dubbed Series B3 and previously in 2020 it had raised $11 million in a Series B2 funding round.
