Udaan, a fast-growing B2B marketplace in India, launched in 2016 with a goal of becoming a large ecommerce portal designed to help small and mid-sized business compete and grow online.
With the gross merchandise value of its annual transactions already at about $1.2 billion, Udaan.com appears well on its way and is attracting serious funding. The marketplace recently raised $300 million in a Series D funding round, bringing its funding to date to more than $680 million, according to India-based ET Tech.com and Crunchbase.
Udaan was founded by three veterans of Flipkart, a major online retail marketplace also based in India. In India’s charged-up online retail market, Walmart Inc. paid $16 billion in 2018 for a controlling interest in Flipkart.
Helping small businesses expand
Amod Malviya, co-founder, Udaan
But Udaan co-founders Amod Malviya, Vaibhav Gupta and Sujeet Kumar had other ideas for growing an ecommerce marketplace when they left Flipkart. The three decided that small and mid-sized businesses were an underserved market in India, where they figured a B2B online marketplace would disrupt old methods of doing business and help small companies grow through internet connections with trading partners and provide goods to India’s retailers and other businesses, Malviya says in an interview posted by India’s YourStory Media.
Udaan says its marketplace, with more than 1 million buyers and sellers, also provides payment and logistics services. Other B2B marketplaces in India include the much larger IndiaMART.com, which says it hosts more than 82 million buyers and nearly 6 million suppliers of a wide range of business and industrial products, and Ninjacart.com, which connects farmers with food retailers. In addition, Amazon Business opened a site for India in 2017.
Udaan’s recent funding round was led by Silicon Valley investment firms Altimeter Capital and GGV Capital. Prior investors also contributing to the Series D funding round include DST Global, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Footpath Ventures and Hillhouse Capital Management.
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