Walmart and Flipkart Group make additional investment in

 Walmart and Flipkart Group make additional investment in Ninjacart

Walmart and the Flipkart Group today announced a fresh round of investment in Ninjacart, the innovative startup disrupting India’s fresh produce market with its made-for-India business-to-business (B2B) supply chain infrastructure and technology solutions. This follows the investment made by Walmart and the Flipkart Group in December 2019, as the companies continue to focus on ensuring access to high quality fresh produce for consumers and retailers while creating economic opportunities for farmers through the continued use of technology. 

For Ninjacart, this further deepens the partnership with Walmart and the Flipkart Group to improve its offerings and enhance customer experience. Ninjacart continues to attract world-class backers such as Tiger Global, Accel, Tanglin, Steadview, Syngenta, Nandan Nilekani and Qualcomm among other prominent investors.

During the COVID lockdowns, Ninjacart demonstrated agility and innovation by launching a series of initiatives such as apartment delivery, including a ‘Farm to fork’ pilot with Flipkart, customer delivery through food delivery apps, ‘Harvest the Farms’ initiative, etc. in a week's time to help both customers and farmers. Also in an Industry-first move, Ninjacart launched ‘FoodPrint’ — a 100% traceability platform for its products during the COVID lockdown to improve the food safety.

This second round of funding demonstrates Walmart and the Flipkart Group’s continued commitment to invest in India’s agriculture & food supply chain and strong confidence in Ninjacart. The follow-on investment further validates Ninjacart’s strong execution capabilities and its ability to innovate in the challenging fresh food supply chain space.

As Flipkart grows its Supermart (grocery) and Flipkart Quick (hyperlocal business), Ninjacart will continue to play a key role in providing fresh produce to consumers across the country as they increasingly look at e-grocery to meet their needs.

Ninjacart has developed many indigenous solutions that work for India at scale — it has built India’s low-cost last-mile network using an innovative network model coupled with data science. It’s less-than-12 hours connectivity from farm to store helps avoid the need for control temperature supply chain for perishable goods.

Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO, Flipkart Group, said, “The e-grocery market in India has seen tremendous growth over the past several months as people have increasingly taken to ordering groceries and fresh produce online. At the Flipkart Group, we are focused on ensuring that we continue to work towards developing new and innovative ways to meet our customers' needs in this space through the growth of Supermart and the recent launch of Flipkart Quick. We will continue to make investments to offer the best produce to our customers and support livelihoods and sustainable growth for local farmers, producers and the supply chain ecosystem. Our pilots and current business engagement with Ninjacart have been encouraging as we leverage technology to address changing consumer behaviour across the country.”

Commenting on the announcement Thirukumaran Nagarajan, CEO & Co-founder of Ninjacart said, “The fresh set of investments from Walmart and the Flipkart Group takes us one step closer to our vision of making food safe and accessible for the billion people and changing the way food reaches our plate. We are excited to have Walmart and the Flipkart Group show confidence in our capabilities around growth and profitability. We will continue to invest in areas that impact the lives of Customers and Farmers positively.”

In the coming months, Ninjacart will use the capital to expand to new markets and build new offerings and supply chains for emerging customer segments, while continuing to innovate on the supply chain to make it more efficient, reliable, and profitable.

The transaction is expected to close by the end October 2020.

IndiGo CarGo operations on a high

IndiGo CarGo operations on a high, with over 1700 charters since April

IndiGo generated highest ever monthly net revenue in Aug’20 at only 32%
operational capacity

 

In-line with its mission to support the nation, IndiGo operated over 1700 CarGo charters, transporting more than 14300 MT of supplies since 18th April’20 till 07th September’20. The CarGo charter flights operated across 21 destinations within India and internationally, including new stations like Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan, Cairo in Egypt, Almaty in Kazakhstan and Tashkent in Uzbekistan. IndiGo operated these flights while adhering to all the precautionary measures.

IndiGo has already transported CarGo equivalent to the loads carried in the last financial year, within the last five months at limited capacity. The airline has in fact earned marginally higher revenue over these months as compared to the earnings over the last financial year. Furthermore, at only 32% of operations in Aug’20, IndiGo successfully managed to generate highest ever monthly net revenue with January being the last top earning month.

Mr. Ronojoy Dutta, Chief Executive Officer, IndiGo said, “The COVID-induced lockdown this year not only posed a challenge for our business but also turned out to be an opportunity for the CarGo vertical. We operated passenger flights in ‘freighter mode’ with CarGo secured in the cabins, to domestic and international stations. We have deployed 10 aircraft for CarGo operations and will continue this arrangement even after we resume operations at pre-covid capacities. We have learnt a lot of lessons over the last few months on the CarGo side, while strengthening revenue streams and creating new records. We are proud to have played a part in maintaining and supporting supply chains in and out of the country by flying medical supplies, fresh vegetables and other export CarGo. IndiGo will continue to contribute and adapt its business to the needs of the hour”.