Browsing Tag: Startups

When Epsagon launched last fall, the Israeli startup had an idea to monitor serverless architectures, specifically AWS Lambda. But the company didn’t want to confine itself to monitoring a narrow class of applications, and today it announced it is now able to monitor a broader set of microservice development approaches.

CEO and co-founder Nitzan Shapira says when it launched, the startup wanted to take aim at serverless and Lambda seemed to be the prime tool for doing that. “Our product was basically a tracing, troubleshooting and monitoring tool that was automatically doing all of that for the Lambda ecosystem. And since then, we’ve seen actually a bigger shift [beyond] just Lambda,” he said.

That shift was to a broader view of this kind of deployment across a set of modern applications involving microservices. When developers move to these modern approaches, it becomes impossible to launch an agent to help monitor what’s happening. Yet the developers still need visibility into the applications.

To help, the company is launching a tracing and logging tool together, a first for this type of monitoring, according to Shapira. “Today, with engineering and DevOps working closer than ever, being able to automatically trace microservices applications without using an agent and combine the tracing and the logging in one platform is extremely valuable,” he said.

Shapira says that over time the company plans to expand this idea and support more frameworks out of the box to allow this kind of open tracing across different tools. “We need to provide support for more and more frameworks becoming popular. Lambda is just one framework,” he explained.

Serverless is somewhat of a misnomer. The servers are still there, but instead of programming to launch on a particular server, virtual machine (VM) or set of VMs, the cloud infrastructure vendor provides whatever infrastructure resources a developer requires at any given moment automatically.

Microservices encompass the idea that instead of building a monolithic application, you break it down into a series of smaller services, typically launching them in containers and orchestrating the containers in a tool like Kubernetes.

The company only came out of stealth last October, so it’s still early days, but it is already expanding, opening a sales office in the U.S. with a four-person staff. The engineering team remains in Israel. It is approaching 20 employees in total.

Shapira wouldn’t talk about exact customer numbers, but says the company has hundreds of users now and is doubling the number of paying customers every month.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Serverless monitoring startup Epsagon expands to cover broader microservices

There’s a new cannabis-infused drink company coming together, helped along by the venture firm DCM, which just plugged $5 million in seed funding into the company.

Called K-Zen Beverages, the months-old startup represents the second cannabis-related investment for DCM after Eaze, the on-demand cannabis delivery platform.

So what’s the appeal? The opportunity to unlock a new market, it seems. Though Bay Area-based K-Zen has yet to roll out its first product — it’s working on three drinks that will be sold as shots and come in lemon chamomile, pink lemonade and wild berry flavors — there aren’t yet throngs of cannabis-infused brands. At least, it remains an open playing field, and the opportunity that K-Zen is chasing looks to be big.

According to one of the boldest predictions so far — unsurprisingly, it’s one that cannabis startups and investors love to cite — the investment bank Canaccord Genuity recently posited that marijuana-infused beverages could hit $600 million in the U.S. by 2022.

Currently, many cannabis-infused beverages, including beer, still lack the psychoactive compound THC because of regulations around it. Companies have instead been infusing their drinks with CBD, a compound that can be derived from both cannabis and hemp plants and that has taken off since industrial hemp cultivation was made legal in the United States last year.

But things are changing quickly. Though pot remains illegal at the federal level, 34 states have now legalized medical or recreational marijuana, and more are expected to join their ranks. That largely explains the timing of a startup like K-Zen — whose name blends “kaizen,” a Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement, and “zen,” a state of calm originally associated with Zen Buddhism. More to the point, it explains why K-Zen isn’t steering clear of THC but will instead sell one drink that features it exclusively, and blends of CBD and THC with the others.

As explains co-founder and co-CEO Judy Yee — a veteran of numerous packaged goods and health and wellness companies — K-Zen is looking to target people like herself, a busy working mother who was looking for new ways to “bring joy into an active lifestyle” and had become “cannacurious” by last year.

In fact, it was after Yee tried topicals, then some experimental beverages, that she began discussing the emerging trend with a friend who Yee had crossed paths with at numerous jobs over the years. As luck would have it, that friend, branding expert Soon Yu, was once funded by DCM. Convinced that he could help Yee sell a product like K-Zen, Yu picked up the phone, shared K-Zen’s vision, and voilà, a check was written.

Now, Yee and Yu just have to have the product made — then sell it.

Yee says K-Zen is on target to roll out its beverages this summer, where they will be made available in dispensaries, beginning in California, and directly to consumers via its site.

The five-person startup may have to educate customers first. The reason: marijuana-infused foods typically take at least an hour to kick in, making it harder for consumers to anticipate how they will feel and what the impact will be of the THC they ingest.

Yee readily acknowledges the challenge and says K-Zen is already considering how to help its customers. “People know what a glass of wine does to them, but [we may] create a pictogram” that helps people understand what to expect and when, depending on the amount of THC in the product.

Very possibly, by summer, more of its future customers will have least tried one cannabis drink, given how quickly people are gravitating to new cannabis products.

Though K-Zen is early to the game, it is not alone. As the outlet Eater recently pointed out, among other upstarts, a Seattle company called Trukino already makes both THC and CBD varieties of apple cider. Another company, California Dreamin,’ sells THC-infused sodas that taste like tangerine.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | K-Zen Beverage, a nascent cannabis-infused drink brand, has raised million in seed funding

Barcelona-based Hubtype has raised a €1 million (~$1.1M) seed round led by Madrid-based early stage VC firm, K Fund. The team last raised when the business was founded, back in February 2016, when they took in €235,000 in a mix of public and angel funding.

Hubtype targets enterprises and developers with customer service focused tools to help build and scale what it describes as “conversational messaging experiences” — aka messaging interfaces that go beyond more basic chatbot-style offerings to support richer interactions and ‘smart’ automation, such as knowing when to hand off to a human agent.

“We know very well that chatbots aren’t enough on their own, as we’ve been building bots for three years. To provide effective and meaningful interactions, companies need to go beyond bots and provide conversational experiences: Micro-apps within the messaging channels that everyone uses daily,” say co-founders, Eric Marcos and Marc Caballé, explaining the wider context around the space as they see it.

“Conversational experiences take the best of chat (conversational user interfaces) and combine elements of graphical user interfaces like websites, apps, etc. Effective ones aggregate AI, decision trees, webviews, human agent hand-off and more. Furthermore, enterprise companies need integration with other APIs and systems, from back-end inventory and order tracking to booking engines, analytics, NLP services and more.”

They argue that orchestrating all these different elements can be “extremely difficult and time-consuming” for businesses lacking a dedicated tech team to handle building and maintaining smooth chat-based customer interactions.

That’s where Hubtype sees an opportunity to elbow in, starting with a b2b focus but aiming to tilt fully at developers over the long term.

Hubtype’s opensource framework for building conversational apps, called Botonic, is based on React.js. Using this it claims a single developer can build, deploy and scale conversational apps across multiple messaging channels (including webchat) — doing away with the need for a full dev team to build and maintain everything.

The team’s goal is to become “the reference platform” for developers to create conversational apps using React.js. Some of the seed funding is therefore pegged for building out Hubtype’s developer relationship program, as well as ploughing into product development and scaling the sales team.

“We’re currently a b2b company and our target customers are enterprise-level companies mainly in banking, insurance and e-commerce/retail,” the co-founders note, adding: “Eight out of more than 20 customers are in the Forbes Global 2000 List, with some ranking in the top 20 such as Volkswagen, Inditex, HP, and Bankia.”

“With this funding round we’re investing in further developments of our framework, including AI capabilities which will allow clients to train their chatbot in one language and roll out automatically in about 100 languages. We’ll also be building our developer relationship program and scaling our sales team,” adds  Caballé in a statement.

Hubtype tells us it expects to reach 100 customers this year — though they’re not disclosing exact customer numbers yet.

“We have a strong presence in the Spanish enterprise ecosystem and within international brands that operate in Europe. We provide our service globally but we’re currently focused on the EU and testing some emerging markets where WhatsApp is prevalent, as we are one of the few official solution providers for the platform globally,” the co-founders add.

Asked about the competitive landscape, Hubtype names Accel-backed Rasa as an “AI centric” bot-builder framework rival with a similar “bottom up” focus on marshalling developers to build adoption.

Another competitor the co-founders point to is Botpress, saying it has a somewhat similar approach while flagging a different business model (focused on “consulting/services centric”).

Microsoft Bot Framework and Dialogflow are two other rival frameworks they name — but again the suggestion is both are AI centric, rather than supporting a richer mix of conversational components.

“The difference between us and our closest competition is that we have a very clear niche (React developers) and we are pioneers in advocating for conversational apps (text+GUI and using NLP and AI as elements) rather than AI or NLP-centric experiences. Most of our competitors are focused on AI and NLP,” they add.

“Our tools focus on building applications that sit at the intersection between text-based and graphic interfaces. We take into account NLP, AI, interactive messages, webviews, managing context, human handoffs and multichannel integrations. Additionally, we aggregate more messaging channels than all or most competitors.”

Commenting on the seed raise in a statement, Jaime Novoa, associate at K Fund, added: “The chatbot industry has undergone a major transformation from text to conversational apps, and Hubtype is leading enterprise companies to build the best customer experiences in a scalable way by using automation. Companies must move from traditional phone and email communication and into a new era of multichannel conversational messaging. Hubtype is an important addition to our investment portfolio, and timing is key.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Hubtype raises .1M to help developers build richer chat support

Aito, a Helsinki-based machine learning startup that is developing “predictive database” technology, has raised €1 million in pre-seed funding, including from Nokia Chairman Risto Siilasmaa (via his investment company First Fellow Partners).

Others backing the round are Hermitage, UMO Capital, together with funding from Business Finland. Previous Aito investors include Futurice and the company’s own founders Vesa-Pekka Grönfors, Antti Rauhala, Kai Inkinen.

Aiming to replace current machine learning tools that have a steep learning curve and generate only single-purpose models, Aito has built a predictive database for developers. Specifically, it lets users search existing information, make predictions, and find hidden correlations.

Crucially, the results are said to fully explainable and the tech can be integrated into existing software as easy as integrating an SQL query.

“The idea of an unconventional approach to AI and machine learning dates back for more than ten years,” Aito co-founder Vesa-Pekka Grönfors tells me. “Antti, co-founder and chief scientist of Aito, started working with the concept already at the end of his studies and continued through the following years as a Lead Data Scientist at Futurice [the European consultancy company]”.

More broadly, Aito is founded on the premise that software developers are the new AI developers. There are some 23 million software developers in the world, and they increasingly work with machine learning or AI-related features, meaning its no longer only the domain of data scientists only.

“They require tools that are quick to adopt, support agile workflows and are familiar without specific knowledge of data science,” adds Grönfors.

“Aito.ai is a predictive database for developers who value quick time to market. It’s familiar as a database, yet provides the intelligence of machine learning… Predictions, recommendations, and explanations are provided in milliseconds over a beautiful API, using the entire Aito database as training data. Where traditional database gives the user, for example, five past purchases of an e-commerce customer, Aito can automatically predict the next likely purchases and explain what lead to such prediction”.

As an example, a subscription business could feed their product, financial, user and event data into Aito, and get out various business critical predictions and insights such as: predict demand, explain conversion, predict churn, optimise pricing, personalize content, recommend products, maximize lifetime value and more.

Already being tested in the wild, Aito is currently being used to automatically suggest categories for documents uploaded to contract management system; to find relevant movies based on similarity; and to automate conversational UI workflows and provide predictions on which customer complaints will escalate.

“Futurice, where Aito was spun off from, uses Aito to find who knows about a certain topic within an organization. Simply by typing a term, Aito uncovers the people with such knowledge based on several internal data sources, with no taxonomy or tagging needed,” says Grönfors.

Meanwhile, the Aito business model is a classic enterprise SaaS developer play: the pricing model is based on the size of a user’s dataset and volume of queries. Pricing starts from €6 per day and there is a free trial period.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Nokia Chairman Risto Siilasmaa backs machine learning startup Aito.ai

Urban Jungle, a digital insurance startup targeting so-called “generation rent” with a range of insurance products, has raised £2.5 million in seed funding round.

The round is said to be backed by a mixture of new and previous investors, including Rob Devey, ex CEO of Prudential UK, and Simon Rogerson, CEO of Octopus Group.

Described as challenging traditional insurance providers by catering for U.K. renters who have historically been underserved by the insurance industry, Urban Jungle offers contents insurance, gadget insurance and tenants liability policies.

This includes a contents insurance product focused on house and flat sharers. The startup also offers a pay-as-you-go policy, and says it is committed to transparent pricing policy terms.

“We are fixing home insurance, which has a load of problems to work on,” says Urban Jungle co-founder Jimmy Williams. “Of all of types of personal insurance, it’s still the one most bought and managed offline, mostly through estate agents, banks and mortgage brokers. Prices are high, terms are complex, and there are fees for everything”.

Alongside this, Williams says customers are often asked far too many questions about things that are outside their control, which they resent, and are becoming increasingly aware of outdated and unfair pricing. “Much of this is caused by insurers’ inability to use new sources of data appropriately,” he adds.

In contrast, Urban Jungle aims to be cheaper, and easier for customers to buy, manage and claim. It also wants to provide cover better suited to customers’ needs.

“All of this is enabled through technology,” says Williams. “We automate the vast majority of processes to make things super quick, and keep our costs very low. We also use data in smart ways to customise the cover we offer to customers, and make pricing fairer”.

To that end, Urban Jungle claims 15,000 plus customers and says it’s growing over 30 percent per month. Meanwhile, today’s newly disclosed funding brings the total raised by the U.K. company to £3.7 million to date.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Urban Jungle raises £2.5M to make insurance accessible to ‘generation rent’

There still exists an old-fashioned problem in travel: group travel that requires individuals and groups to plan and book personalized, multi-day tours online.

Tourlane is a major player in this sector and has today announced it’s raised $47 million in a round led by Sequoia and Spark Capital, alongside investors from the B round, including DN Capital and HV Holtzbrinck Ventures. This Series C funding comes six months after the B round, and will be used for further international expansion, hiring and product development.

Julian Stiefel, co-CEO and co-founder of Tourlane, said in a statement: “The additional capital will help us strengthen our position and continue our international growth to create the best experience in travel. We’re thrilled to continue working with our high-class investors and are extremely proud of the hard work, commitment and effort of our great team at Tourlane.”

Tourlane works directly with service providers and offers customers flights, accommodations, tours, activities and transfer options in one place, thus saving time when coordinating multiple bookings from different vendors or working with offline travel agents. The platform provides real-time pricing, availability, instant trip visualization and drag-and-drop adjustments to make multi-day trip planning easier.

Andrew Reed, partner at Sequoia, said: “Tourlane’s impressive growth and passionate community of users reinforce the uniqueness of what they’re doing. Tourlane is truly redefining the way people experience travel.”

Tourlane employs more than 200 people.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Tourlane raises a M C round led by Sequoia and Spark Capital

Luckin Coffee, the ambitious Chinese upstart that’s going after Starbucks, could raise nearly $600 million from its upcoming IPO. That’s according to a price range released by the Chinese startup.

In a new filing, Luckin said it plans to sell 30 million shares at an initial range of $15-$17. That gives an estimated raise of $450 million to $510 million, but it could be bumped up if underwriters take up the additional allocation of 4.5 million shares. So, as a grand total, the listing could raise $586.5 million if the full offering is bought at the top of the range.

The company will list on the Nasdaq as “LK.”

Luckin filed to go public last month, just weeks after it closed a $150 million Series B+ funding round led by New York private equity firm Blackrock, which interestingly holds a 6.58 percent stake in Starbucks. The deal valued Luckin at $2.9 billion and it took the three-year-old company to $550 million raised from investors to date.

The company has burned through incredible amounts of cash as it tries to quickly build a brand that can rival Starbucks, and the presence that the U.S. firm has built over the last 20 years in China. Through aggressive promotions and coupons, the company posted a $475 million loss in 2018, its only full year of business to date, with $125 million in revenue. For the first quarter of 2019, it carded an $85 million loss with total sales of $71 million.

Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson has been vocally dismissive of the viability of that strategy of “heavy, heavy discounts.”

“We’re deploying capital and building 600 new stores per year. [We’re] generating the return on invested capital that we believe is sustainable to continue to build new stores at this rate for many years to come,” he told CNBC in a recent interview.

Starbucks claims 30,000 stores worldwide. It has been in China for 20 years and is aiming to reach 6,000 stores in the country by 2022. Luckin, fueled by that VC money, has quickly scaled to reach 2,370 locations in less than two years, with plans to add a further 2,500 this year. That would see it overtake Starbucks — which has 3,600 stores across 150 Chinese cities — although that metric gives a distorted view, as Luckin specializes in digital orders and on-demand delivery (in contrast to the retail model operated by Starbucks).

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Luckin Coffee plans to raise over 0M in US IPO

Most of the strategy discussions and news coverage in the media and entertainment industry is concerned with the unfolding corporate mega-mergers and the political implications of social media platforms.

These are important conversations, but they’re largely a story of twentieth-century media (and broader society) finally responding to the dominance Web 2.0 companies have achieved.

To entrepreneurs and VCs, the more pressing focus is on what the next generation of companies to transform entertainment will look like. Like other sectors, the underlying force is advances in artificial intelligence and computing power.

In this context, that results in a merging of gaming and linear storytelling into new interactive media. To highlight the opportunities here, I asked nine top VCs to share where they are putting their money.

Here are the media investment theses of: Cyan Banister (Founders Fund), Alex Taussig (Lightspeed), Matt Hartman (betaworks), Stephanie Zhan (Sequoia), Jordan Fudge (Sinai), Christian Dorffer (Sweet Capital), Charles Hudson (Precursor), MG Siegler (GV), and Eric Hippeau (Lerer Hippeau).

Cyan Banister, Partner at Founders Fund

“In 2018 I was obsessed with the idea of how you can bring AI and entertainment together. Having made early investments in Brud, A.I. Foundation, Artie and Fable, it became clear that the missing piece behind most AR experiences was a lack of memory.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Where top VCs are investing in media, entertainment & gaming

Carta, a seven-year-old, San Francisco-based startup, is the newest unicorn in tech. The company, which largely helps private company investors, founders, and employees manage their equity and ownership, tells TechCrunch it has raised $300 million in a Series E round at a $1.7 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Firm co-founder Marc Andreessen is also joining the board.

The round has been a poorly kept secret. The outlet The Information reported more than a month ago the details that Carta is sharing today. In fact, that leak has given people in the industry who understand Carta’s business time to quietly ask of its valuation whether it isn’t high for a company that does what it does.

Unsurprisingly, Carta argues that it is not, that it has evolved considerably from the outset — which is true. Though it launched as a way for venture-backed companies to manage equity, issue securities, and track their cap tables, by 2014, Carta, formerly known as eShares, had moved beyond replacing paper records and into selling as a monthly service appraisals of the fair market value of private companies’ common stock in order to determine their strike price. It calls this  “409A-as-a-service.”

Carta has continued tacking on more services. Among the most notable was the launch last year of a fund administration product designed to help venture capital firms not only manage their portfolio stakes more easily but to more seamlessly work with their own investors or limited partners. Toward this end, Carta now provides portfolio analytics, including deal IRRs and cash management, it helps VCs distribute their quarterly investor reports and it integrates with third-party tax and payroll providers.

Carta has so many pieces in place that in a call on Friday, founder and CEO Henry Ward told us Carta is taking what may be its biggest step yet and becoming the first real “private stock market for companies.” Its massive new funding round is “about act three,” he said. “Now that you have this network of companies and investors all on one platform and the ability to transfer securities, you can build liquidity on top of it.” It’s this vision that enticed Andreessen to jump aboard, he suggested.

There’s unquestionably a need for a kind of private stock market. Private funding has been outpacing IPO funding for years, and it shows no sign of stopping. It’s largely why the SEC is trying to better enable people who are not accredited investors to access private company shares. Most of the U.S. has missed out on the wealth creation happening before companies go public or sell to other companies.

It’s also true that Carta has its hooks into a meaningful number of startups and venture firms at this point. The company says more than 700,000 shareholders are on its platform, that it works with more than 11,000 companies and that its fund administration product now serves 143 venture firms.

Still, some longtime industry observers wonder if Carta isn’t mashing together a lot of disparate, moderately lucrative businesses and positioning it as the next-big platform company, and the view resonates. For one thing, Carta likes to talk about assets managed, though it’s really talking about how much in assets the startups and VCs that use its platform control, which is $575 billion altogether. Carta — which now employs nearly 600 employees across seven offices — says its own annual revenue run rate is currently $55 million.

Relatedly, while Ward says Carta’s primary revenue right now is its software subscription business — another revenue stream is the money it’s paid by the venture firms that use it as a fund administrator — people who question Carta’s fundraising note the people-intensive nature of the kind of work that Carta has been systemizing. Yes, there’s a sophisticated software component, but Carta is more Accenture than Salesforce, and services businesses are valued very differently.

There’s also the question of growth. Ward points to the roughly 450 startups that are garnering venture funding each month right now — all potential customers for Carta. But plenty of companies are also quietly going out of business all the time, a process that will accelerate whenever this very long funding boom finally slows.

This newest business conveys the impression that big things are coming, though it doesn’t sound exactly like a private stock market as Ward describes it, either. Primarily, it won’t provide the relative transparency that stock markets do. We don’t think that’s the case, anyway. Ward was somewhat dismissive of questions we asked about how Carta’s newest business will be fundamentally different than that of secondary players in the market that are already making it possible for shareholders to value and transact shares.

Indeed, though Carta says it’s changing how assets are acquired, valued and transacted, Ward also did not respond to several simple follow-up queries sent to him on Friday about the mechanics of this new business, dubbed CartaX. Instead, he thanked us for our efforts to understand and articulate Carta’s business. Meanwhile, his press team told us it was limited in what it can say about how CartaX operates for now.

Carta has savvy investors. In addition to Andreessen Horowitz, this newest round includes Lightspeed Venture Partners, Goldman Sachs Principal Strategic Investments, Tiger Global, Thrive Capital and earlier backers Tribe Capital, Menlo Ventures and Meritech Capital.

No doubt that in valuing the company, they took into account that Solium — a Canada-based software-as-a-service for stock administration, financial reporting and compliance that was publicly traded — sold for $900 million in cash earlier this year to Morgan Stanley. That’s roughly double Carta’s total funding so far of $447 million.

More likely, they were viewing the company based on its potential as a highly liquid market, ambitious as that might seem today. Consider that the parent company to both the NYSE and the Chicago Stock Exchange currently has a market cap of roughly $45 billion. Then again, that company operates 12 exchanges and marketplaces altogether, and it enjoyed more than $6 billion in revenue last year by transacting more than a $100 billion dollars in volume on a daily basis on the NYSE alone.

Perhaps most important to them, Carta is now as well-positioned as any outfit to capture and cater to the growing number of privately held companies looking to provide more of their employees liquidity and to cash out early investors. Add to the mix a mega-round and a star board member, and the company may well get to where Ward and his investors want it to go.

We’ll be watching to see.

[Correction: We’d originally misstated the market cap of Intercontinental Exchange, owner of the NYSE and Chicago Stock Exchange, among other marketplaces; we cited its annual revenue instead.]

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Carta was just valued at .7 billion by Andreessen Horowitz, in a deal some see as rich

India has a new unicorn after BigBasket, a startup that delivers groceries and perishables across the country, raised $150 million for its fight against rivals Walmart’s Flipkart, Amazon and hyperlocal startups Swiggy and Dunzo.

The new financing round — a Series F — was led by Mirae Asset-Naver Asia Growth Fund, the U.K.’s CDC Group and Alibaba, BigBasket said on Monday. The closing of the round has officially helped the seven-year-old startup surpass $1 billion valuation, co-founder Vipul Parekh, who heads marketing and finances for the company, told TechCrunch in an interview. Chinese giant Alibaba, which also led the Series E round in BigBasket last year, is the largest investor in the company, with about 30% stake, a person familiar with the matter said.

The company, which offers more than 20,000 products from 1,000 brands in more than two dozen cities, will deploy the fresh capital into expanding its supply-chain network, adding more cold storage centers and distribution centers to serve customers faster, Parekh said. The company also plans to add about 3,000 vending machines that offer daily eatable items, such as vegetables, snacks and cold drinks in residential apartments and offices by next month, he added.

Infusion of $150 million for BigBasket, which raised $300 million last year, comes at a time when both Walmart’s Flipkart and Amazon are increasingly expanding their grocery businesses in India.

Amazon Retail India, which operates Amazon Pantry and Prime Now services and has a presence in mire than 100 cities, is reportedly planning to expand its business in India. Flipkart Group CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy said in an interview with the Economic Times last month that the e-commerce giant may pilot a fresh foods business soon. Last week, Flipkart was said to be in talks to acquire grocery chain Namdhari’s Fresh.

Parekh largely brushed off the challenge his company faces from Flipkart and Amazon at this stage, saying that “it is a very large market, and it is unlikely to be dominated by one single company for the simple reason of its complex nature.” Flipkart and Amazon may eventually get serious about this space, but so far their play with groceries is mostly an additional differentiation checkpoint, he said.

“The success in this business requires having the ability to build and manage a very complex supply chain across multiple categories such as vegetables, meat and beauty products among others. Our focus has been on building the supply chain, and also ensuring that we are able to deliver a very large assortment of products to consumers,” he added. He said BigBasket today offers the largest catalog and fastest delivery among any of its rivals.

Besides, BigBasket, which is increasingly growing its subscription business to supply milk and other daily eatables, is also inching closer to becoming financially stronger. Parekh said BigBasket expects to become operationally profitable in six to eight months. “The idea is that business by itself does not consume cash. If we use cash, it will be for investment in new businesses or scaling of existing businesses,” he said.

India’s retail market, valued at mire than $900 billion, is increasingly attracting the attention of VC funds. Since 2014, online retailers alone have participated in more than 163 financing rounds, clocking over $1.38 billion, analytics firm Tracxn told TechCrunch. More than 882 players are operational in the market, the firm said.

The challenge for BigBasket remains fighting a growing army of rivals, including hyperlocal delivery startups including Grofers, which raised $60 million earlier this year, unicorn Swiggy and Google-backed Dunzo, which is increasingly becoming a verb in urban Indian cities.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Grocery startup BigBasket becomes India’s newest unicorn with new 0M investment