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Foodtechie Jumbotail Raises $8.5M in Series A from Kalaari and Nexus

“98% of India’s food and grocery consumption is via Kirana stores. Jumbotail brings tech centric innovation to address massive inefficiencies in terms of product discovery, distribution costs, stock outs, and pricing.”

Jumbotail, a leading online marketplace for food and grocery has raised 8.5 million dollars in Series A from Kalaari Capital and Nexus Venture Partners. Nexus Venture Partners had earlier invested 2 million dollars in the company. Jumbotail serves thousands of wholesale customers such as kirana stores and Horeca (Hotel/Restaurant/Café) businesses in Bangalore. The company plans to utilise the funds for building cutting edge technologies and enhance operational capabilities to deliver the best customer experience in the wholesale food and grocery sector.

Founded in November 2015 by Stanford alumni S. Karthik Venkateswaran and Ashish Jhina, Jumbotail's vision is to organise the food and grocery ecosystem in India using technology, data science and design. Jumbotail offers a wide selection of products including staples, spices, dry fruits, packaged foods, and FMCG products. Sellers (traders, manufacturers and brands) can list their food, grocery and FMCG products on the Jumbotail Marketplace, which is accessible to customers through a mobile app available in 4 languages - Kannada, Malayalam, Hindi and English. Jumbotail provides full stack services including storefront delivery and payments collection for its sellers, as well as working capital credit from third party credit providers to its customers using rich transactional data and proprietary algorithms.

Ashish Jhina, cofounder and COO, Jumbotail, says, “Manufacturers and brands can instantly get direct and highly targeted access to thousands of retailers and institutional customers through the Jumbotail platform without needing to invest in expensive physical distribution networks. Jumbotail also opens up the Kirana network to financial institutions looking to extend credit in a cost-effective and scalable manner.”

Bala Srinivasa, Partner, Kalaari Capital, adds, “98% of India’s food and grocery consumption is via Kirana stores. Jumbotail brings tech centric innovation to address massive inefficiencies in terms of product discovery, distribution costs, stock outs, and pricing. We are excited by their ability to eliminate information asymmetry, aggregate previously unavailable demand and supply data, and significantly improve economic outcomes for manufacturers, brands, financial institutions and kirana owners."

“While this is a multibillion dollar market opportunity, it requires us to solve challenging problems that are so unique to India that copycat models will not work. We are putting our customers first and building technologies and supply chains that will work for the next billion Indians in distributed, chaotic and unstructured environments”, says Karthik Venkateswaran, cofounder and CEO, Jumbotail.

Sameer Brij Verma, Director, Nexus Venture Partners, adds, “Nexus is glad to have partnered with the Jumbotail team since its very inception. Jumbotail is going after a very large but inefficient market that requires very strong first-principles approach towards solving challenges across commerce, efficient fulfilment, payments and credit via their platform. We feel this team and their technology platform has a shot at solving these challenges to create enduring value for the kirana/Horeca segment over the next few years.”



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