Jumbotail, a business-to-business (B2B) marketplace for food and grocery products, has raised $85 million in its Series C round led by Artal Asia, per an announcement.
Ajax Capital, the family office of veteran FMCG entrepreneur Ajay Gupta, also participated in the round.
This marks the Series C round for the company that saw a combination of both primary and secondary investments with early investors Nexus Venture Partners and Kalaari Capital taking minor part-exits.
The total capital raised by the company currently stands at $125 million.
With the investment, Francis Cukierman, managing director at Invus Asia and Benjamin Felt, managing director at Invus US will join Jumbotail’s board of directors.
“We nearly quadrupled our scale in 2021 and are looking to further accelerate our growth trajectory in the coming year,” said Ashish Jhina, co-founder & COO at Jumbotail in a statement.
Jumbotail claims to connect nearly 2000 FMCG & staples brands and sellers to 150,000 kirana stores across 38 cities and towns in India via its full-stack e-commerce model consisting of its B2B e-commerce marketplace platform and its warehousing and logistics supply chain network.
Its new retail platform helps transform kirana stores into modern omni-channel convenience grocery stores under the J24 brand within 24-48 hours.
Founded in Nov 2015, Jumbotail plans to use the funding to triple its engineering, product, and design teams, among others. Simultaneously, it is also looking to scale its core B2B marketplace to 100 cities and towns across India, expand its network of J24 stores, invest in large scale kirana entrepreneur skill development initiatives.
An estimated 14 million kirana stores in India control more than 95% of the country’s over $500 billion food and grocery market.
Artal Asia is an affiliate of Invus, which is a global equity investment firm with over $10 billion of evergreen capital under management. It operates out of offices in the US, Europe and Asia.
Invus is the exclusive investment advisor of Artal Group, based in Luxembourg, and its Singapore-based affiliate Artal Asia Pvt. Ltd.