Sangeetha Chengappa

Google-backed, hyperlocal delivery app Dunzo, is set to close $60 million in fresh funding in the next 60 days and another round of $100 million by the first quarter of next year. The funds will be used to expand to 200 locations in 20 cities at the rate of 10 locations per city, a top executive told BusinessLine .

Founded in 2015 by Ankur Aggarwal, Dalvir Suri, Kabeer Biswas and Mukund Jha, Dunzo is Google’s first direct investment in India. The start-up has raised a total of $36 million to date from a clutch of investors including, Aspada Investment Advisors, Blume Ventures, Alteria Capital and Google.

Available to users in Bengaluru, Pune, Delhi, Noida, Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Chennai and more recently Mumbai, Dunzo allows users to pick up and drop, buy from stores/restaurants/retail outlets and use its bike taxi services in Gurgaon and Hyderabad.

“We raised our last round of funding in December 2018 and in the last 18 months have grown from 60,000 orders a month to two million transactions, registering 30X growth in 18 months. By December, we want to grow to 8 million transaction. We will make it happen. And by next year we want to get to 25 million transactions” said Kabeer Biswas, Co-founder and CEO, Dunzo.

Asked about raising fresh funds, he said “We will close a $60 million fund raise in the next 60 days and $100 million by first quarter next year,” without sharing investor names and other details.

Pointing out that there were around 65 hyperlocal delivery/concierge start-ups when Dunzo first raised capital in 2016, Biswas said “None of them are around today. I think, what we did right was, we did not spend a single dollar on marketing till six months ago. And we got our first 1.5 million downloads purely through word of mouth. Secondly, we always looked at customer data and changed our assumptions of what works and what doesn’t and built our services around it.”

Dunzo has 35,000 two wheeler delivery partners, of which two per cent use cycles to deliver, and 4,500 are bike taxi partners. The start-up has partnered with over 5,000 local merchants in the cities they operate in.

On the addressable market size for Dunzo’s services, Biswas said, “We are playing in a market which has around 600 million monthly transactions by about 40-50 million users who transact around 10-15 times a month. Why should these transactions be offline, they should all get digitised with something like Dunzo, which makes these transactions frictionless. Our aspiration is to get a share of this market.”

At present, 60 per cent of Dunzo’s business comes from users buying from local stores, 30 per cent is from pick and drop services and the rest is from its bike taxi services.