Big Basket, India’s one of the leading online grocery delivery service provider has received around Rs. 1,250 crores ($200 million) from Alibaba — the China-based eCommerce giant.
The round also witnessed participation from existing shareholders including UAE-based private equity investor Abraaj Group, Sands Capital, and International Finance Corporation (IFC).
The newly raised funding will be used by the company to prepared itself to compete with US-based Amazon and India’s Flipkart — both of which have significant money in their coffers and have forayed into the grocery space.
Hari Menon, co-founder, and CEO of Big Basket said:
We are going to use this capital to go deeper in our existing markets. Our focus will be to aggressively grow over the coming months.
Earlier, in July last year, there were reports suggested that Alibaba and Paytm Mall were in talks with Big Basket for an investment of around $200 million. While Paytm has not invested in Big Basket yet, a report from Economic Times claims that the company has entered into a “commercial agreement” with this investment from Alibaba. Notably, Alibaba is one of the majority shareholders in Paytm.
As per the reports, with this new funding round, the total valuation of the Bangalore-based startup has now reached the $850 million mark. According to the reports, the transaction will also include a secondary component of $80-100 million.
Big Basket was founded in 2011 by Hari Menon, Vipul Parekh, Abhinay Chaudhary and VS Sudhakar. While it has now been valued at about $850 million, the last fundraising activity valued the Bangalore-based company at $450 million.
Some reports suggest that the company was also in discussions with Amazon for an investment but the talks did not materialize over several issues, including the company’s valuation.