Indian B2B ecommerce platform udaan bags $280m in new funding round

udaan, an India business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce platform, has secured $280 million in additional financing from existing and new investors.

The existing investors of udaan, which took part in the funding round are – Lightspeed Venture Partners, Altimeter Capital, DST Global, GGV Capital, and Tencent.

The B2B ecommerce platform welcomed two new investors in the form of Moonstone Capital and Octahedron Capital.

Established in 2016, udaan has so far raised a total of $1.15bn.

The company plans to use the new funds for its continued market creation of b2b ecommerce in India, extending to some more small businesses across the country.

Among the major areas of investment will be continued expansion of certain products and categories available on udaan, bettering user experience, improving technology platform, growing its SME financing capabilities, and strengthening of the supply-chain infrastructure.

Indian B2B ecommerce platform udaan bags $280m in new funding round

Amod Malviya – Co-founder of udaan said: “Covid-19 has accelerated the already fast digital-led evolution of highly fragmented and unorganized Indian trade/ retail industry. While at the same time, the pandemic also highlighted unique structure of Indian economy, with millions of kiranas and neighbourhood stores becoming the lifeline of our country at the time of crisis.

“udaan is at the forefront of this uniquely Indian eCommerce opportunity, emerging in the last 4 years as one of the largest eCommerce platforms in India, while taking an India-first mobile-first approach to eCommerce. This financing enables us to further our journey of taking eCommerce to the depth and breadth of the country, with udaan’s unique low-cost model for core middle India.”

Udaan’s platform is claimed to provide best price, highest quality, and largest range of products to its network of retailers by linking them to sellers, brands, and manufacturers across India.

The platform’s SaaS offerings that include analysis of real time marketing feedback via app data analytics helps brands and manufacturers in making well-informed decisions regarding product launches and evaluation of new products in various markets.