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.

Flipkart builds Hyperlocal Capabilities with the

Flipkart builds Hyperlocal Capabilities with the launch of ‘Flipkart Quick’ 

• Beginning with Bengaluru for select locations, Flipkart Quick will expand to 6 other cities in next few months

• Through a 90-mins delivery model for handpicked assortment of products, Flipkart Quick will enable ecosystem partnerships for a safer and reliable experience

• Flipkart Quick has huge potential to digitize kiranas by bringing them onto e-commerce marketplace

Flipkart, India’s homegrown e-commerce marketplace, today announced the launch of its hyperlocal service - ‘Flipkart Quick’ building on its technology capabilities and supply chain infrastructure. Flipkart Quick is aimed to offer unmatched customer experience, riding on wide selection, top-class quality and a new location mapping technology framework. The hyperlocal delivery model aims to tap new consumers by widening the accessibility of products and enabling consumers to order products from Flipkart hubs in their location, ensuring quick delivery.

Modernising consumers’ daily shopping experience in terms of product accessibility, availability and affordability, Flipkart Quick will provide consumers with a handpicked assortment of more than 2,000 products in categories varying from Grocery, Fresh, Dairy, Meat, Mobiles, Electronics Accessories, Stationery Items and Home Accessories in the first phase. Consumers can choose to order in the next 90 minutes or book a 2-hour slot as per their convenience. Customers can place orders anytime of the day, and get their orders delivered between 6am to midnight; starting with a minimum delivery fee Rs 29.

Commenting on the launch, Sandeep Karwa, Vice-President, Flipkart, said, “Hyperlocal capabilities can be described simply as building connections between locally available products and consumers in a particular area. This is a great model for India as households of all sizes are already used to their neighbourhood Kirana stores. In fact, Indian families are so comfortable with what we call the ‘hyperlocal context’, that there is a tendency to develop deep, familial ties with vendors, shopkeepers and service providers - now with the convenience of e-commerce. While we start with our dark store (no-walkin) model, wherein we enable sellers to store inventory close to the consumer;  this model has the potential of encouraging local entrepreneurship and enabling new business strategies and partnerships. Today, with Flipkart Quick - our Hyperlocal capability, we have the potential to bring together the whole network of neighbourhood Kirana stores onto our platform with just a click.”

Flipkart Quick will debut in Bengaluru in select locations, including Whitefield, Panathur, HSR Layout, BTM Layout, Banashankari, KR Puram and Indiranagar.

Flipkart Quick will adopt a latitude and longitude approach that will not only narrow down the location to be more precise but will also result in sharper delivery time. Moving away from the traditional model of using a pin-code system to identify the delivery location, which can span across a larger area, Flipkart Quick will use innovative and advanced technology for location mapping. This technology promises to not only speed up the last mile process, but also bring more accuracy to the address mapping system, hence avoiding chances of mis-match or re-attempts.

Retail in India, both online and offline, has been witnessing radical changes over the past two years. But over the last 50 days or so, we have witnessed unique innovations and business models emerge with great agility and operational efficiencies. Half way through the year of the pandemic, supply chains have transformed drastically. The hyperlocal category, known for being a convenience for many, has now emerged to be a long-term essential service for the country. It has led to a significant change in consumer psyche and expectations with the CAGR expected to be considerable, with the Indian hyperlocal market potentially exceeding INR 2,306 crore by 2020 (pre-COVID industry estimates).