Dunzo India get funded for $40 million by Google

Google is writing check to a different startup in India. The Android-maker, which last year unveiled a $10 billion fund to take a position within the world’s second largest internet market, said on Tuesday that it's participating during a $40 million investment round of hyperlocal delivery startup Dunzo, a Bangalore-based firm that it's also previously backed.

Five-year-old Dunzo said Google, Lightbox, Evolvence, Hana Financial Investment, LGT Lightstone Aspada, and Alteria among others participated in its Series E financing round, which brings its to-date raise to $121 million.

Dunzo operates an eponymous hyper-local delivery service in nearly a dozen cities in India including Bangalore, Delhi, Noida, Pune, Gurgaon, Powai, Hyderabad and Chennai. Users get access to a wide-range of things across several categories, from grocery, perishables, pet supplies and medicines to dinner from their neighborhood stores and restaurants.

E-commerce accounts for fewer than 3% of all retail sales in India, consistent with industry estimates. Mom and pop stores and other neighborhood outlets that dot tens of thousands of cities, towns, villages and slums across the country drive most of the sales within the nation. The way Dunzo has grown, it poses a challenge to e-commerce firms like Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart, also as local food and grocery delivery startups like Swiggy, Zomato, BigBasket, and Grofers. Several people also use Dunzo to select up and move random items like a laptop charger or wallet or a lunch box from one point within the city to a different .

“As merchants go digital, Dunzo helps small businesses in their digital transformation journey in support of business recovery,” said Caesar Sengupta, VP, Google, during a statement. “Through our India Digitization Fund, we’re committed to partnering with India’s innovative startups to create a very inclusive digital economy which will benefit everyone.”

Kabeer Biswas, chief executive and co-founder of Dunzo the startup has grown its annual gross merchandise value business to about $100 million. (GMV wont to a well-liked metric that several e-commerce firms relied on to demonstrate their growth, however, it’s one among the meaningless ways to measure a startup’s growth. Most firms have stopped using GMV. Additionally, when a startup speaks GMV language, traditionally it's meant they're anything but on the brink of profitability, which happens to be true within the case of Dunzo.)

“Dunzo’s mission resonated stronger than ever in 2020. we've been amazed by everything merchants and users have began to depend upon the platform for. We truly believe we are writing a playbook for a way hyperlocal businesses are often built with sustainable unit economics and capital responsibility. As a team, we are more focused than ever to enable local Merchants to urge closer to their Users and build one among the foremost loved consumer brands within the country,” Biswas said during a statement.

Google, which invested $4.5 billion in Jio Platforms last year, recently backed social news app Dailyhunt and Glance, a neighborhood of ad giant InMobi Group that's aggressively expanding ways to populate content on Android users’ lockscreen. Google is additionally in talks with local social media ShareChat and should alone invest quite $100 million within the Indian startup. Talks about Google’s interest in ShareChat has previously also been reported by local media houses Economic Times and ET Now.