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Walmart and the Flipkart Group today announced a fresh round of investment in Ninjacart, the start-up disrupting India’s fresh produce market with its B2B supply chain infrastructure and technology solutions. This is the second undisclosed investment made by Walmart and the Flipkart Group in Ninjacart, the last one was in December 2019.
This second round of funding demonstrates Walmart and the Flipkart Group’s continued commitment to invest in India’s agriculture and food supply chain and strong confidence in Ninjacart and further validates Ninjacart’s strong execution capabilities and its ability to innovate in the challenging fresh food supply chain space, the company said in a statement. The transaction is expected to close by the end of October 2020.
Ninjacart launches FoodPrint to map veg and fruit details
During the Covid lockdowns, Ninjacart launched a series of initiatives such as apartment delivery, including a ‘Farm to Fork’ pilot with Flipkart, customer delivery through food delivery apps, ‘Harvest the Farms’ initiative, etc. in a week’s time to help both customers and farmers. Also, in an industry-first move, Ninjacart launched ‘FoodPrint’ — a 100 per cent traceability platform for its products during the Covid lockdown to improve food safety.
As Flipkart grows its Supermart (grocery) and Flipkart Quick (hyperlocal business), Ninjacart will continue to play a key role in providing fresh produce to consumers across the country as they increasingly look at e-grocery to meet their needs. Ninjacart has developed many indigenous solutions like a low-cost last-mile network using an innovative network model coupled with data science. Its less-than-12-hours connectivity from farm to store helps avoid the need for supply chain with temperature control, for perishable goods.
Supply-chain innovation
Thirukumaran Nagarajan, CEO and co-founder of Ninjacart, said, “The fresh set of investments from Walmart and the Flipkart Group takes us one step closer to our vision of making food safe and accessible for the billion people and changing the way food reaches our plate. We are excited to have Walmart and the Flipkart Group show confidence in our capabilities around growth and profitability. We will continue to invest in areas that impact the lives of customers and farmers positively.” Ninjacart will use the capital to expand to new markets and build new offerings and supply chains for emerging customer segments while continuing to innovate on the supply chain to make it more efficient, reliable, and profitable.
Leveraging technology
“The e-grocery market in India has seen tremendous growth over the past several months as people have increasingly taken to ordering groceries and fresh produce online. At the Flipkart Group, we are focused on ensuring that we continue to work towards developing new and innovative ways to meet our customers’ needs in this space through the growth of Supermart and the recent launch of Flipkart Quick. We will continue to make investments to offer the best produce to our customers and support livelihoods and sustainable growth for local farmers, producers and the supply chain ecosystem. Our pilots and current business engagement with Ninjacart have been encouraging as we leverage technology to address changing consumer behaviour across the country” said Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO, Flipkart Group.
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