Your Tech Story

online grocery store

Instacart Reveals IPO Filing, Disclosing PepsiCo Investment, Profitability

Instacart Reveals IPO Filing, Disclosing PepsiCo Investment, Profitability

Leave a Comment / News, Tech News / By

Headquartered in San Francisco PepsiCo has agreed to purchase a total of $175 million in chosen convertible shares from Instacart, which disclosed this in a secret filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of the United States for its IPO scheduled for May 2022.

Instacart Reveals IPO Filing, Disclosing PepsiCo Investment, Profitability
Image Source: techstartups.com

A number of venture capital companies Sequoia Capital, TCV, D1 Capital Partners, as well as Valiant Capital Management, together with a branch of Norges Bank called Norges Bank Investment Management, have all consented to take part in the IPO as cornerstone investors, according to Instacart.

Instacart’s sales for the six-month span that concluded on June 30 was 1.48 billion dollars, an increase of 31 percent over the comparable period in 2016. Revenue from advertising and other sources rose 24 percent to 406 million dollars. In contrast to a 74 million dollars loss a year earlier, it declared total sales of $242 million for the six months.

A few days following SoftBank Group-powered chip manufacturer Arm Holdings revealed the necessary documents for its initial public offering filing, Instacart announced plans to go public.

As part of an upsurge of well-known companies gauging investor interest in new stocks, Instacart is anticipated to issue its stock in September along with Arm, along with marketing automation company Klaviyo. Due to the Ukrainian crisis caused by Russia and the rise in interest rates, the marketplace for new listings has been restrained for the majority of the previous two years.

The listings, if successful, may revive the American initial public offering (IPO) market, which has begun to demonstrate signs of life this year thanks to betting that the U.S. Federal Reserve’s interest rate policy will help the country’s economy have a soft landing.

”I think we’re going to see more companies kick off their (IPO) process in 2024, which is when a healthy IPO market will return,” said Mike Bellin, IPO services leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers U.S.

cnbctv18.com

According to experts, the assertion that Instacart is profitable could assist it in winning over apprehensive IPO financiers who have shied away from listing unprofitable firms since last year.

Also Read: TechCrunch Select Omnisient as One of World’s Top 200 Game-Changing Startups

“Instacart is entering the public markets at a time of cautious enthusiasm,” said Alex Frederick, an analyst at PitchBook. “Despite facing challenges in sustaining order volume since the pandemic peak, Instacart’s strategic moves, including the introduction of food-stamp payments and the Instacart+ membership program, have propelled its success.”

ttnews.com
Blinkit

From Grofers To Blinkit, Providing Instant Delivery Services For Grocery Shopping.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By

Blinkit is an e-commerce platform for grocery shopping. Over one crore Indians use Blinkit to shop for everything from veggies and supermarket staples to electronics and emergency supplies. It is the first company to introduce the rapid delivery concept to India. It delivers over two lakhs orders every day.

About the Company

Formerly known as Grofers, Blinkit is an Indian company providing instant delivery services for grocery and other items. It is headquartered in Gurgaon. Customers of Blinkit can place online orders for groceries and other necessities using a smartphone application. The delivery persons of Blinkit then collect the ordered items from the warehouse and deliver them within 10 minutes to the customer. BY 2021, the company was fulfilling over 1.25 lakh orders every day. In India, Blinkit is presently available in over 30 cities. As of 2021, SoftBank, Tiger Global, and Sequoia Capital have invested over 630$ million in the company.

Image source: tosshub.com

History of the Company

Saurabh Kumar and Albinder Dhindsa established Blinkit as Grofers in December 2013. They teamed together to enter the supermarket delivery market after getting to know one another while working for Cambridge Systematics in the late 2000s. Their objective was to find solutions to the issues caused by the industry’s lack of organisation (both on the client and merchant ends). Before expanding to other Indian cities, the company conducted a test run in Delhi NCR. After operating as an online service that delivered groceries for seven years, Blinkit offered quick grocery delivery services in India by constructing dark storefronts throughout the country’s cities. The company claimed to have delivered over 7,000 grocery products in Gurgaon in fifteen minutes in July 2021. After completing over 20,000 under-15-minute, deliveries each day across ten cities, it offered 10-minute delivery across the top 12 cities a month later, in August 2021. In keeping with its goal to promote quick commerce, Grofers changed its name to Blinkit on December 13, 2021. To take advantage of the rapidly expanding market for speedy grocery delivery, food delivery network Zomato has agreed to purchase Blinkit for $569 million in an all-stock deal. The deal is currently underway.

Business Model

An online marketplace served as the foundation of Blinkit’s business plan. They took orders through their website or app. Blinkit uses a partnership approach to deliver the goods in less than 10 minutes for all of its business activities. To do this, it collaborates with regional companies and brands, logistics, warehousing, transaction partners, and payment solutions. As a result of the greater visibility, partner retailers received more orders; Blinkit made money by charging a commission based on a percentage of these sales. It presently offers a 10-minute delivery service through more than 250 associate retailers.

Controversies

Groceries, fresh produce, meat, stationery, bakery goods, infant care, pet care, snacks, flowers, etc., are the main items that Blinkit provides. The 10-minute delivery service offered by the business was criticised in August 2021, and delivery partner safety issues were brought up. In a tweet, CEO Albinder Dhindsa defended the quick delivery system and asserted that there had been no accidents because of this.

Founders – Albinder Dhindsa, Saurabh Kumar

Eight years ago, in 2013, Albinder Dhindsa and Saurabh Kumar co-founded Grofers. In addition to being an IIT Mumbai alumnus, Saurabh earned his MS at the University of Texas in Austin. He served as the head of operations at Rasilant Technologies before joining Grofers and was an engineer at Cambridge Systematics in New York before that. Albinder Dhindsa is currently the CEO of Blinkit. In 2005, he started working as a transportation analyst at URS Corporation after completing his education. He worked for two years before switching to Cambridge Systematics as a Senior Associate, where he met Saurabh. Dhindsa decided to leave his work in 2010 to pursue his MBA in the United States. He worked for UBS Investment Bank for three months in 2011 while living in the US. He has also served as Zomato’s Head of International Operations.

Instacart

Apoorva Mehta : The Founder of Instacart, the ‘Uber of Grocery’

Leave a Comment / Founder, Inspiration, Product, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

The internet and the rise of the tech giants like Google, Microsoft and Amazon have inspired a lot of people out there to start their own innovative business. And there is much evidence that the inspiration has worked for numerous people. The Internet has helped people to get idea from their daily needs and transform it into a successfully functioning business. One such person, who was inspired by the success of the big tech companies, is Apoorva Mehta, the founder of Instacart. Mehta was awed by the fact that how the new startups were getting success overnight. And hence, after trying out over 20 business ideas, he finally started Instacart.

Early Life and Career

Mehta belongs to the Indian descent, but was born and brought up in Canada. He had always been inclined towards the internet and technology. He had also been interested in learning science and computer programming. After completing his school education, Mehta joined the University of Waterloo, to complete an electrical engineering degree.

After completing his graduation, Mehta worked for companies like Qualcomm and BlackBerry. Though he had got good jobs, he was a bit confused about what he really wanted to do. Later, in 2008, Mehta moved to Seattle, to work with Amazon. He joined Amazon as the supply chain engineer. But, here too, he could not feel the passion for work and left the company after two years, in 2010.

The Inspiration for Startup

Apoorva Mehta Instacart
Image Source: celebritynetworth.com

With the rise of the tech companies, he had already developed an interest in entrepreneurship, so Mehta started looking for ‘the’ idea, that would help him establish a successful business. It took him over two years and 20 failed startup ideas to finally reach to Instacart. Before Instacart, Mehta tried to build an ad network for the gaming com to developing a social network for lawyers. But nothing worked for him.

After brainstorming for two long years and testing out those twenty startup ideas, Apoorva Mehta stopped and analysed, what he was doing wrong. He even thought of quitting, as none of his ideas had worked out. But persistence is the key. This time, he decided to work with passion and patience. He also realized that a business is successful when it solves a problem. So, he started looking for a problem that he could solve. Ultimately, he got an idea of developing an online grocery delivery service, which came out straight from his own pain point.

While working at Amazon, Apoorva Mehta was unable to find time to go for grocery shopping. He could order anything online, but there were no grocery delivering services. He found an opportunity in the problem and started working to solve it.

Finding the Investors

Mehta developed the app for his new startup ‘Instacart’ and started looking for investors. He tried to get into the Y Combinator tech incubator 2012, but the summer intake was already closed. So he had to take the other way around. He met a few of the partners of Y Combinator to request them to provide him entry into the incubator. But no one agreed. He met the last partner, who did not reject him, but said that the startup idea was nearly impossible.

Apoorva Mehta came back empty-handed but sent a pack of beer to that last partner through his app. This act made that partner think of this idea again, and he convinced the other Y Combinator partners to open the entry for Mehta. And this way, the doors of success were also opened for Mehta and his startup. Finally, he launched the company in 2012, in San Francisco.

The Rise of Instacart

In two years from its inception, the company gained a $40 million and spread to 17 different locations within the U.S. and Canada. The company was named as the ‘Most Promising Company in America’ by Forbes in 2015, and even, valued at $2 billion just in three years.

In 2016, the company went to expand in the North Chicago Zone, and the next year, the company was serving in 1,200 cities in 25 states. By the end of the year, the company partnered with Loblaw Companies for deliveries. The company raised a total of $400 million investment and valued at $3.4 billion.

In 2018, Instacart partnered with companies like Walmart Canada, HyVee, The Fresh Market, Harps, Lunds & Byerlys. It even acquired a Canada-based grocer named Unata. After raising a $200 investment in February 2018, the company raised another $600 million funding in October the same year and valued at $7.6 billion.

Mehta’s startup idea was unique and became successful within a year of its inception. And today, it is among the unicorn companies. The reason behind the success of Instacart is that it was different from the other businesses. It won’t be wrong if we call Instacart the Uber of grocery, as there was no warehouse to store the grocery and no official vans were bought to do the deliveries. In fact, the grocery came directly from the retailers, and the company hired people with their vehicles to do the deliveries. Both Instacart and the retailer are in benefit, and there is no spending of money on the physical cost resources.

Bigbasket : The Success Story of India’s Biggest Online Grocery Store

Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

The days are long gone, when we had to wait for our turn in the long queues at a grocery store after roaming around and shopping for hours. Since online trading has seized a bigger part of marketing, the grocery stores are also getting modernised. And with this revolutionary change, a lot of online grocery stores came up in the digital market, such as Farm2Kitchen, ZopNow, etc. But only a few of them were able to stand high after multiple business turmoil, especially after the dot-com boom. Bigbasket is one of those successful start-ups that became India’s largest supermarket within a few years. Though the founders of Bigbasket started their start-up journey around the time of the market crash in 2000, they were able to establish as one of the leading online grocery stores.

Founders of Bigbasket

Conventionally, when we hear about recent start-ups, we think of young minds with brimming enthusiasm in the business field. But, it has always been that extraordinary ideas come from experienced minds.

Bigbasket founders
Image Source: thenational.ae

Bigbasket is one such start-up whose five founding members already had enough experience in this industry and were skilled in their fields.

Mr Hari Menon, the current CEO, and one of the founders of Bigbasket, also served as the CEO of IndiaSkills, Co-founder of Fabmall, Country Head at Planetasia and Business Head at Wipro.

The four other founding members of Bigbasket includes Mr V S Sudhakar, Mr Vipul Parekh, Mr Abhinay Choudhari and Mr V S Ramesh.

Each of the founders has a unique vision about the business, and their ideas complement each of them. Sudhakar has got a vast experience in the IT sector, and he is also the founder and CEO of Fabmall. Parekh is the Head of Finance and Marketing at Bigbasket, whereas Choudhari serves as the Head of New Initiatives. With 21 years of experience in the logistics sector of the Indian Navy, Ramesh is currently the Head of Logistics and Supply Chain of the company.

History

The five founders started their first online business, Fabmart.com, in 1999. The online grocery division of this business was launched in 2001, and the company grew exceptionally. They also started a succession of grocery supermarkets called Fabmall in Southern India, which the Aditya Birla group acquired in 2006, rebranding it as More. But the founders were still too adamant about establishing something bigger in the grocery market of India and finally launched Bigbasket in 2011.

The Journey Towards Success

The company raised around $10 million in the first round of funding from Ascent Capital. By 2014, the company was growing massively in three major cities, confirming over 5,000 orders every day. In March 2016, the company raised $150 million from Abraaj Capital in Series D funding. In the same year, the company also crossed targeted 10 million customers orders and also received 1million orders in a single month. By June 2017, the company raised around $290 million in total from 8 rounds of funding and 11 investors. In the same year, the company’s most lucrative investors were Paytm and Alibaba, from whom the company raised $280 million in the Series E funding. Some of the investors who participated in the investment rounds of Bigbasket are Bessemer Ventures, Helion, Zodius, LionRock Capital and Meena Ganesh.

With all the investments it received, Bigbasket decided to expand the business in other cities of India, too. The company also built several warehouses and invested in cold room facilities to enhance the range of fresh products. It also invested in technology to make delivery more efficient and shopping easier, both from the browser and mobile application. But amid the growing competition in the market form other companies, like Grofers and LocalBanya, Bigbasket started focussing more on personalized shopping.

After deep research of 5 years, Bigbasket figured out that the products in demand varied from city to city. This helped the company to put more emphasis on those products and expand the number of brands. For example, for the city with more demand for dairy products, Bigbasket introduced an extended range of brands of the milk products for that particular city. This strategy escalated the profit of the company and helped outdo its rivals.

The Future

The company allows customers hassle-free browsing through the products and relaxed shopping. Today, Bigbasket sells more than 12,000 varieties of products of 1,000 different brands in 25 cities.

According to some estimates from the experts, the company may value over $1.2 trillion by 2020.