BENGALURU: Business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce start-up Udaan has raised $120 million in convertible notes and debt, led by existing shareholders and bondholders. With this round, the total funds raised by the company via convertible notes and debt in the last four quarters have crossed $350 million.
The start-up, which is backed by Tencent and Lightspeed Ventures, is eyeing to go public in 12-18 months.
In an internal mail, the start-up’s CFO Aditya Pande said, “Despite the funding related challenges being experienced by the larger start-up ecosystem, this fundraise reflects the confidence of investors in our business model and their endorsement of the journey to unit economics.”
Its unit economics improved by 1000bps with equally strong improvements in both gross margins and operating cost. The CFO told employees that the monthly buyer repeat rates have increased by 500+bps in the last two quarters.
Founded in 2016, Udaan has operations across categories including lifestyle, electronics, home & kitchen, staples, fruits and vegetables, FMCG, pharma, toys and general merchandise. “We have made significant investments to build a tech-led solid and sustainable business...we have made significant progress in the past few years’ journey,” the CFO added.
The Bengaluru-based start-up has over 30 lakh retailers and 25,000 sellers across 900 cities, covering more than 12,000 pin codes. The platform has over 1.7 million retailers, chemists, kirana shops and farmers, doing over 4.5 million transactions per month.