India-based grocery e-commerce platform Grofers has received Rs 4bn ($61.4m) in a round led by internet and telecommunications firm SoftBank, the Times of India reported on Friday.
Hedge fund manager Tiger Global Management and private investor Yuri Milner also took part. SoftBank supplied $40m and now owns a stake in Grofers sized at between 35% and 40%, while Tiger Global contributed $15m and owns a share estimated by TOI to be 25%.
Founded in 2013, Grofers operates a low-price online store for items such as food and drink, household products and pet care. The goods are delivered to the user’s home at a prescheduled time, though Grofers had originally launched as an on-demand service.
Grofers raised the latest round at a valuation of $300m, marking a 20% drop from its last round. It was forced in 2016 to cut its workforce by 10% and wind down operations in nine cities, taking its presence from 26 to 17 locations, though the service is now available in 25 markets.
The company raised $120m in a November 2015 series C round led by SoftBank that also featured Tiger Global, venture capital firm Sequoia Capital and Apoletto Managers, a fund managed by partners of investment firm DST Global.
Sequoia and Tiger Global already supplied $35m in series B funding for Grofers seven months before, after the same two investors had backed its $10m series A round in February 2015. Sequoia had originally injected $500,000 in seed capital in 2014.
Albinder Dhindsa, co-founder and chief executive of Grofers, said: “The business is in a much healthier place and almost 10 times the size it was in November 2015 when we last raised capital.
“We took a lot of hard decisions to fix parts of the business that were not scaling well and our efforts have clearly contributed in making sure we have a clear path to profitability as well as the largest market share in the online grocery segment.”