Since past few months online grocery delivery startup Grofers has been promising to revolutionize India’s e-commerce space by delivering grocery products to consumer’s doorsteps in flat 10 minutes. As ambitious as this sounds, Grofers’ CEO Albinder Dhindsa claims that his company can pull it off this seemingly audacious challenge.
Now Dhindsa has decided to accelerate his pursuit by opting for a major rebranding exercise. Starting today Grofers will be known by a new name called ‘Blinkit.’ The new brand name seems to suggest that groceries will be delivered in a ‘blink of an eye’ to the consumers.
The rebranding exercise comes at a time when Blinkit is reportedly in talks with existing investor Zomato to raise fresh tranche of funding. As per unconfirmed reports, the funding round is in the range of $500 Mn.
Notably, Zomato is already a strategic investor in Blinkit after having invested $100 Mn to claim approximately 9.3% stake in the Gurugram based startup. This investment took place barely a month after Zomato’s high-profile IPO.
Another interesting development that is worth noting is that Blinkit seems to have shelved its Nasdaq IPO plan. Blinkit or Grofers was planning to list itself in the American capital market through a Spac deal. But this plan seems to have been put on hold especially after Zomato picked a strategic stake in the online grocery major.
However, Blinkit is not the only one that is trying to seize the market share in the quick e-commerce space. Softbank backed Swiggy is reportedly planning to make heavy investment in its quick e-commerce arm Instamart, Tata owned BigBasket and Google owned Dunzo.
Realistically, the 10 minute e-commerce space seems utterly challenging particularly considering that Indian roads are behest with traffic and other infrastructure problems.