At a time when the whole world was going crazy after B2C online grocery start-ups, two former classmates from Stanford University stepped out on a limb to make a counter bet. Like a lawyer prepping his case carefully, the two had closely analyzed India’s grocery retail market and arrived at the conclusion that the road to a successful retail business in grocery ran through India’s 12 million plus kirana shops.
While B2C online grocery start-ups were having their moment under the sun, Ashish Jhina and Karthik Venkateswaran launched their online B2B marketplace for food & grocery in 2015, in Bangalore. Their baby, Jumbotail took off the blocks slowly in the initial years, registering 1,000 small and medium kirana in the first year of operations. By the fifth year of its operations, Jumbotail’s customer base climbed to 30,000 retailers
Today, the platform serves 2,50,000 small and medium retailers across 50+ major cities and towns and it moves 1.1 billion units of products in a year. Worth Rs. 2,262 crore in GMV value, Jumbotail today handles 1.5 million orders every month, of which more than 75% are delivered the next day.
The complete article is published in the August edition of Progressive Grocer. To read the full article, subscribe to the magazine HERE.
