has invested over Rs 4,000 crore in the past 12-18 months across technology, supply chain, and others areas, and is aiming for 100 percent year-on-year growth this financial year, according to co-founders of the B2B ecommerce firm.
Udaan co-founders Amod Malviya, Sujeet Kumar, and Vaibhav Gupta, in an internal mail on Tuesday, highlighted that the company has completed five years of operations this week.
“What started off as an idea to transform the trade ecosystem in the country by solving problems of millions of small businesses across Bharat leveraging technology, is today a reality. We are well on track to become India’s largest commerce platform, not just the biggest ecommerce platform,” the founders said.
Over the years, Udaan’s business model has continued to evolve as per the market requirements, and become sharper, the founders said in their note, a copy of which PTI has seen.
Udaan Co-founders
“We have invested more than Rs 4,000 crore in the past 12-18 months across different pillars of business – technology, supply chain, category, credit, people, compliance, etc – to accelerate and strengthen our capabilities. This is already showing in our growth and we continue to aim for 100 percent y-o-y growth this financial year,” they said.
Founded in 2016, Udaan has over 3 million users and more than 30,000 sellers on its platform. It has over 1.7 million, including retailers, Kirana shops, HoReCa, chemists, and farmers, and more than 5 lakh different products curated across 2,500 brands.
It delivers around 1.5-1.75 lakh orders daily, and 4.5 million deliveries a month.
In February this year, Udaan had said it planned to expand warehouse capacity by fivefold to 50 million square feet across several states in the next 7-8 years. These would include states such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, and Karnataka, among others. Udaan’s current warehousing capacity is at over 10 million square feet with 200 warehouses.
The executives, in their mail, said the second wave of the pandemic did “slow down momentum by a quarter”.
“Our cost of doing business went up as we decided to serve our customers within the lockdown restrictions. Our commitment and resilience to continue serving our customers in a better way, no matter how hard the challenges, have taught us to adapt quickly and manage these short-term disruptions…As we approach the period of July-December’ 21, it is very crucial for all of us to work relentlessly…,” they said.
In January, Udaan had announced raising $ 280 million (about Rs 2,048 crore) in funding from investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Tencent, DST Global, GGV Capital, Altimeter Capital, Octahedron Capital, and Moonstone Capital. The company, which has raised $ 1.15 billion in total to date, was valued at over $ 3 billion posts the transaction.
While Udaan had not disclosed its GMV numbers, a report by Bernstein stated that the company’s GMV was at about $ 2.1 billion ARR (annual recurring revenue) in December 2020.
GMV is a term used in online retailing to indicate the gross merchandise value of products sold through the marketplace over a certain period.
In April, Udaan had announced an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) liquidity programme worth about Rs 175 crore.
