Softbank backed firm Grofers – famous for their 10 minute grocery dropoffs – has now re-branded itself as Blinkit, in order to hint at faster deliveries across various product segments, thus, challenging Amazon India & Flipkart. Grofers’ 10 minute deliveries are fulfilled via more than 100 partner stores/warehouses in cities where it operates.
We saw that this is going to be the future of commerce. We are targeting to have almost 1,000 (partner) merchants by the middle of next year… we are also planning to expand to 100 cities by March.”
~ Albinder Dhindsa, CEO, Blinkit
Its expansion into the wider Indian e-commerce space pits it directly against formidable rivals such as Flipkart, Amazon and the retail push of tycoon billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance in a market which EY expects to grow at an average 27% annually, to touch $99 billion by 2024.
Blinkit has already hired close to 700 people in the last 4 months and plans to upramp it’s operations and workforce aggressively in the upcoming months – all this along with the fleet of almost 20,000 people engaged in delivery operations.
Dhindsa mentioned that the organization, backed by investors like Zomato and Tiger Global, is evaluating it’s investment requirements but most likely won’t raise funds any time soon. Zomato, the restaurant discovery and food delivery firm, is said to be in talks to invest USD 500 million in Grofers, after having co-led a $120-million funding round in June that made Grofers a unicorn.
Grofers competes with the likes of Google-backed Dunzo, Swiggy’s Instamart, and Mumbai-based Zepto in India’s burgeoning quick commerce market, and boasts of processing a million ‘10 minutes delivery’ orders each week across 12 cities.
