E-commerce delivery startup Dunzo gets a shot in the arm with $ 40 million funding

Google-backed delivery and e-commerce firm Dunzo has attracted a fresh round of $40 million in capital from new and existing investors. Investors including Google, Lightbox, Evolvence, Hana Financial Investment, LGT Lightstone Aspada and Alteria participated in this Series E Round. The funding would help Dunzo compete with players such as Swiggy, Zomato, Amazon and Flipkart.

This capital comes after a year of robust growth amidst the Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. This year, the local commerce platform will focus on deploying its playbook for sustainable growth across its fastest-growing cities such as Mumbai, Chennai, and Pune.

With a gross merchandise value (GMV) growth of 2X over the past year, Dunzo is now an about $100 million annualized GMV business. The growth in 2020 comes on the back of strong, organic user demand while maintaining gross margin profitability for the overall business.

“Dunzo's mission resonated stronger than ever in 2020. We have been amazed by everything merchants and users have started to depend on the platform for,” said Kabeer Biswas, chief executive and co-founder, Dunzo Digital Pvt. Ltd.

In the last six months, Dunzo supported over 300 neighbourhoods across 8 cities delivering essential goods to users within 29 minutes on an average. Its relentless push for mobilising Indian cities and empowering the merchant ecosystem has made it the ‘go-to’ local commerce product in the country. As cities are reopening, it continues to see strong growth across user segments.

"As merchants go digital, Dunzo is helping small businesses in their digital transformation journey in support of business recovery," said Caesar Sengupta, vice president, Google. Last year in July, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced an investment of $10 billion in the India Digitization Fund.