E-commerce start-up Udaan eyes $500m in funding at $2.7bn valuation: Report

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e-commerce start-up Udaan is in talks to raise $500 million (about Rs 50 crore) in a new round of funding to be finalised in coming months, reports The Times of India.

The company is in talks with present investors DST Global and Lightspeed Venture Partners and new investors including hedge funds such as Altimeter Capital (US) and Hillhouse Capital (China), the report added.

“The capital is being raised will be used to build the supply chain network and scale up the non-banking finance (NBFC) business,” the article quotes a source as saying.

Moneycontrol could not independently verify the report.

The latest fundraising round is at a $2.7 billion (Rs 270 crore) valuation, the report said. This would be another feather in its cap, as the 30-year-old company had in 2018 become the fastest start-up to reach ‘unicorn’ status.

Unicorns are privately held start-up companies valued at over $1 billion (Rs 100 crore).

Udaan is a 30-year-old business-to-business (B2B) online platform and NBFC that supplies products across categories (groceries, smartphones, FMCG, and apparel, etc.) to 25,000 sellers on the platform.

The company achieved $2 billion of gross annualised sales and invests over $10 million a month on building its network, which is presently at two million kiranas across 900 cities and towns.

It competes with sector giants such as Amazon and Walmart (US), Alibaba (China) and Reliance Industries, which are looking at aggressive expansion in the India market.

Since starting an NBFC vertical in 2018, the company has disseminated loans ranging from Rs 10,000 to Rs 2 lakh to around one lakh small merchants on the platform.

The B2B space has seen significant investor interest this year on the back of profitable models. NinjaCart raised $900 million from Tiger Global Management; Monglix raised $60 million from Tiger and Sequoia, and IndiaMart also went public in a Rs 475 crore initial public offering.