Milkbasket, a micro delivery platform for groceries, has secured a $3 million investment in a Pre-Series A Round from Unilever Ventures, the investment arm of FMCG major Unilever, and its existing investors. The company said that they will use the fresh capital to strengthen its technology, expand their assortment & customer base and monetising other streams of revenues. This infusion of investment looks like a trance of its 'Pre-Series A' funding round of $500,000 led by Blume Ventures and Lenovo Capital and Incubator Group (LCIG) in August 2017. A week after of which, EVC Ventures, a venture capital fundraiser and accelerator based in Chicago, sold their stake from Milkbasket, and said that they earned an internal rate of return of 200%, within a year of its investment. Based out of Gurgaon/NCR, Milkbasket was founded by Anant Goel, Ashish Goel, Anurag Jain and Yatish Talvadia in 2015. Initially only offering milk, the subscription-based delivery platform now provides about 5,000 products and serves over 15 clusters across Gurgaon, each cluster has a base of around 500 customers. The company registers pre-paid 5,000 orders in a day, which can be amended till midnight before the delivery is scheduled, and the delivery can be scheduled anytime between 4am to 7am. Milkbasket follows the hybrid business model, in which products are sourced from neighbourhood stores, in addition to the company’s own stock. Competition The hyper-local grocery delivery has been seeing a lot of action including from big players. Milkbasket will have to battle with players like Amazon, Grofers, BigBasket,…
