True to its name, online marketplace for SMEs and small businesses Udaan is taking flight to new horizons. After achieving the fastest unicorn tag last year, the Bengaluru headquartered startup is now inching closer to double its market valuation with a new funding round. People privy to the matter claim that the startup is in the midst of closing $500 Mn funding round at a massive valuation of $2.2 Bn.
Udaan’s new round is likely to be led by existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partner and Yuri Milner’s DST Global. New investors Hillhouse Capital and Altimeter Capital will also reportedly pump capital in this round. Sources have claim that the round is most likely to be closed by next week.
Unconfirmed media reports further claim that Udaan had pursued high profile investors like Chinese tech giant Tencent, SoftBank, Tiger Global, Naspers and Sequoia Capital to participate in the round. But these talks evidently collapsed as investors did not agree to higher market valuation pegged by Udaan.
Udaan seems to be depending on its impressive annual gross merchandise value or GMV to demand higher market valuation in its fresh funding round. If recent reports are to be believed then Udaan is clocking annual GMV of $1.2 billion, which is quite impressive for a startup that was founded only few years back.
GMV is a total value of merchandise sold over a period of time and is widely considered as one of the important metrics for an e-commerce company.
Udaan connects retailers & sellers to manufactures
Eliminating the irritant middlemen, Udaan directly connects small businesses and retailers to large manufacturers. This not only helps in streamlining the supply chain but also cost cutting for small businesses as well as manufacturers.
Udaan’s USP lies in the fact that it is not trying to target any one vertical but is building a horizontal platform with wide-ranging categories.
In a nutshell, this Bengaluru based company is trying to become the Flipkart and Amazon of the B2B online marketplace. As ambitious as this goal is, Udaan’s rapid growth signifies that it is certainly ups for the challenge.
The idea of Udaan was conceptualized by three former Flipkart executives – Vaibhav Gupta, Amod Malviya and Sujeet Kumar.