Walmart-owned Flipkart led a $60 million funding round in logistics startup Shadowfax as the e-commerce firm plans to strengthen its delivery service and take on Amazon Prime.
The deal will give Flipkart “a significant minority stake” in the company, Abhishek Bansal, co-founder of Shadowfax, told BloombergQuint over the phone.
Existing investors, including NGP Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Mirae Asset Financial Group, Eight Roads Ventures, the investment arm of Fidelity International, and World Bank-backed International Finance Corporation participated in the Shadowfax funding round.
This is the third investment by Flipkart in a logistics startup. The online retail giant has backed business-to-business logistics firm Blackbuck and locker service provider, QikPod. Besides, the e-commerce firm has its own supply chain subsidiary, Ekart.
The Shadowfax investment comes at a time when Flipkart is expected to launch a two-hour delivery service for its grocery business and same-day deliveries across categories by early next year, one of the persons privy to the plans told BloombergQuint, requesting anonymity.
Founded in 2015, Shadowfax runs a technology platform that connects delivery executives to e-commerce companies and small and medium businesses in about 300 cities. The platform claims it has a crowdsourced network of about 100,000 people registered on the platform who deliver goods for the company. “We have 20,000-25000 daily active partners who do deliveries on the platform,” Bansal said.
The Bengaluru-based firm said that it aims to use the funds to expand its network, strengthen its tech platform and increase the number of shipments to more than 100 million a month.
“We have seen strong synergies with Shadowfax through our existing engagement with them, and their investments in tech-enabled innovations will help us significantly reduce delivery time and provide superior customer experiences across product categories,” Kalyan Krishnamurthy, chief executive officer at Flipkart, said in a statement.
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