Investment – Page 4 – Bada Business

Ninjacart, a Bengaluru-Headquartered Supply Chain Platform, Gets Fresh Investment From Walmart and Flipkart Group

Bengaluru, October 12: Ninjacart, a Bengaluru-headquartered supply chain platform got a major business boost after the firm got a fresh investment from Walmart, Flipkart group. Ninjacart sources fresh produce directly from farmers and quickly delivers them to retailers and businesses. This investment follows the one made by Walmart and the Flipkart Group in December 2019, as the companies continue to focus on ensuring access to high quality fresh produce for consumers and retailers. According to a report by IANS, this is the second round of funding comes at a time when Flipkart is focusing on growing its Supermart (grocery) and Flipkart Quick (hyperlocal business).

Launched in 2015, Ninjacart had earlier raised money from top funds such as Tiger Global, Accel, Tanglin, Steadview, Syngenta, Nandan Nilekani and Qualcomm, among other prominent investors. Thirukumaran Nagarajan, CEO & Co-founder of Ninjacart said that 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.

Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO, Flipkart Group, said in a statement said that 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”, Krishnamurthy said.

In the months to come, Ninjacart will use the capital to expand to new markets and build new offerings and supply chains for emerging customer segments, reports said. The firm while continue to innovate on the supply chain to make it more efficient, reliable, and profitable. The transaction is expected to close by the end October, Walmart and the Flipkart Group said, without disclosing the financial details.

What is a Startup? How Do Investors Add Value To Startups? All You Need To Know

India is now becoming the world’s fastest growing startup ecosystem. In order to understand a startup ecosystem, one needs to know what a startup means! A startup is a young company that is usually founded by one or more entrepreneurs to develop a new and unique product. These entrepreneurs launch a service and bring it to market for people to use and benefit out of it. Startup, as the name suggests, begins with initial funding from the founders, their friends, families, relatives, among others.

Startups are becoming very popular in India. A start-up is basically a company or project begun by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. Startups face high uncertainty but some of them do go on to be successful and influential and become unicorns. The startup process can take a really long period of time and can go up to years to be successful. Hence, sustaining effort is required.

Over the long term, sustaining effort is especially challenging because of the high failure rates and uncertain outcomes. One needs to understand the basic concept that an entrepreneur is an individual while startup is an entrepreneurial team, and needs to work accordingly to achieve the desired goals.

How do Investors add value to Startups?

According to Startup India Portal, which is India’s largest online entrepreneurship, the investors, particularly venture capitalists (VCs) add value to startups in a number of ways. The Startup India Portal platform allows startups to network, access free tools & resources and participate in programs & challenges.

Stakeholder Management: Investors play a key role in building up the startup. They help by managing the company board and leadership to facilitate smooth operations of the newly started firm. In addition, their functional experience and domain knowledge of working and investing with startups imparts vision and direction to the company.
Raising Funds: Investors are best guides for the startup to raise subsequent rounds of funding on the basis of stage, maturity, sector focus etc. and aid in networking and connection for the founders to pitch their business to other investors.
Recruiting Right set of people: Sourcing high-quality and best-fit human capital is critical for startups, especially when it comes to recruiting senior executives to manage and drive business goals. The venture capitalists, with their extensive network can help bridge the talent gap by recruiting the right set of people at the right time.
Proper Marketing of the Product: VCs assist with marketing strategy for your product/service.
Merger and acquisition opportunities: The venture capitalists should be alert about the merger and acquisition opportunities in the local entrepreneurial ecosystem to enable greater value addition to the business through inorganic growth.
Organizational Restructuring: As a young startup matures into an full-fledged established company, the venture capitalists help with the right organizational structuring and introduce processes to increase capital efficiency, lower costs and scale efficiently.

In India, the Government, under the leadership of PM Narendra Modi, has started and promoted Startup India initiative to recognize and promote startups. This initiate is aimed to develop Indian economy and attract talented entrepreneurs.