After successfully raising US$ 300 million from Alibaba Group earlier this year, online grocery store Bigbasket now aims to raise up to US$ 200 million over the next few months, a top company official said.
According to a PTI report: The Bengaluru-based company aims to raise funds from both the existing as well as new investors and the funds will be used for marketing, to build infrastructure and to develop technology.
“We will probably look at a further investment of close to US$ 150-200 million in the next few months. We already had some early talks with investors,” Hari Menon, Co-founder and Chief Executive, Bigbasket told PTI.
Menon said the fund will be used largely for marketing, and to develop infrastructure and technology. The company normally spends Rs 150 crore annually on marketing.
In February, it had raised US$ 300 million from the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and others. Menon said the company has set a target of becoming a US$ 1 billion company in terms of revenue next fiscal year.
The company aims to clock Rs 3,500 crore in sales this fiscal year from, up from Rs 2,000 crore last year.
“The aim is to double revenue each year,” he told PTI.
The company has presence in 25 cities and plans to launch its operations in Kochi soon.
“Having gone deeper into the existing consumer base already, which has been our growth driver, we are now planning to get into the upper middle class and middle class segments” he was quoted by PTI as saying.
Menon noted that Bigbasket, founded in December 2011, has 10 million subscribers and close to 1 lakh orders per day, and aims to breakeven in the 10 large cities by next June.
Bigbasket last month acquired Pune-based RainCan and the Bengaluru-based Morning Cart to deliver milk to 20,000 customers. It has already launched this services in seven cities and expects to rollout to other three cities among the top 10 metros. Menon expects the milk delivery business to be a Rs 1,000-crore business by next year.
