In 2018, Udaan became the fastest Indian startup to achieve unicorn status. Udaan managed to make a strong recovery from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic which had affected almost 60 percent of its business during the lockdown.
E-commerce unicorn Udaan is in talks to raise $150-200 million from existing investors Altimeter Capital, Citi Ventures, DST Global, Footpath Ventures, GGV Capital, Hillhouse Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Tencent.
This comes as the company managed to make strong recovery from impact of the coronavirus pandemic which had affected almost 60 percent of its business during the lockdown, Business Standard reported.
“Udaan’s business has recovered, and it is now in the process of raising fresh funds,” an industry source told the paper.
The current situation has pushed demand for e-commerce and the company’s food business alone has transaction volumes of 8,000 tonnes per day.
In 2018, the 30-year-old company became the fastest Indian startup to achieve unicorn status, and after a $585 million funding round in 2019 Udaan is valued at $2.8 billion.
A business-to-business (B2B) online platform and a non-banking financial company (NBFC), Udaan supplies 500,000 products across categories (groceries, smartphones, FMCG, and apparel, etc.) to 25,000 sellers on the platform.
The company has achieved $2 billion of gross annualized sales and invests over $10 million a month on building its network, which has over 1.5 million retailers across 900 cities and towns.
It competes with sector giants such as Amazon and Walmart (US), Alibaba (China) and Reliance Industries, which are looking at aggressive expansion in the Indian market.
