Funding updates

Reliance set to acquire MilkBasket for over $40 Mn.

It seems to be a season acquisition and consolidation in the e-grocery segment. Just after the news of Tatas acquiring BigBasket comes the development that the Reliance group is all set to take over the online milk and grocery startup Milkbasket. Reliance gobbling up Milkbasket has been doing the rounds…

Reliance gobbling up Milkbasket has been doing the rounds since last year. But the deal did not go through for various reasons, not the least for some internal stakeholders issue within the Gurugam-based startup.

Now apparently everything looks sorted and the deal between the two companies is set to be signed soon.

According to an exclusive report in Entrackr, “the talks have reached the last stage and both parties have agreed upon contours of the deal. Reliance already offered a term sheet early this month and the transaction could be announced soon.”

MilkBasket has generated $33 million in overall risk funding, from several family offices, including Inflection Point Ventures, Mayfield India, Unilever, Beenext, Blume Ventures, Kalaari, Lenovo Capital, and a host of angels. The organization has already been in negotiations with Amazon and BigBasket in the past to buy.

Established in 2015, MilkBasket was praised as a local innovation because of its everyday essentials delivery model. Unlike many other e-commerce sites, it has a sticky user base (household) that buys almost every day. Experts claim, though, that MilkBasket was a relative newcomer in the e-grocery room and that heavyweights such as SoftBank, Tiger Global, Alibaba, and Mirae had taken their stakes by then.

As a consequence, there was hardly any thirst to spend on new models in the grocery store. With all of this probable acquisition, there would be an end to independent plays in the grocery subscription trade space. Reliance is likely to leverage the Goel-led company to ramp up its commercial subscription platform, which has been in pilot mode since last year.

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