“wherever there is a synergy, Udaan work together “
Udaan is India’s collaborative landscape that empowers wholesalers, retailers, traders, and manufacturers using technology as a source. It is designed primarily for small and medium business in India.
Inception
Founded in late 2015 by ex-Flipsters Sujeet Kumar, Amod Malviya, and Vaibhav Gupta, Bengaluru as its headquarters. Sujeet worked as a supply chain, built operations and logistics executive at Flipkart, Amod was the CTO and Vaibhav worked as a senior VP.
The idea was born in need to deliver the best services at unknown places as well. Sujeet confirmed when he was in Flipkart he took delivery to nearly 500 cities but not to places like Bhabua, Bihar. Initially, it was not this ex-flipsters idea to start the business after exit from Flipkart.
When most of the people trying to connect people in the B2B space adding transactions and service credit, a minor hiccups rises in the market making a little disturb in the graph. Udaan is an open marketplace ensuring logistics for every transaction and providing credit if necessary. End of 2016, the trio launched a beta version of Udaan to give more access to the businesses.
Versatility bought the speed
Their experience and execution efforts applied at Flipkart helped them to speed up their business. With the strong founding team and system thinking on how to measure tech and build processes served the startup well from day zero. Their experience in Flipkart helped them to follow the same pattern to build and focus on solving the entire problem in making Udaan.
Business Model
Udaan is a network-centric B2B trade platform and has a different approach towards the business, instead of giving discounts and incentives to the people, the team focused on “Predictability” which is a most critical factor in B2B.
The company does not build everything in-house they collaborate, work and partner with different entrepreneurs and startups to empower them. It is merely a solving credit underwriting problem, payment, logistics, sales, and marketing.
Funding
Udaan raised a total of $284.9M with 4 investors- Lightspeed venture partners, DST Global, Yuri Milner, and Lightspeed India Partners. The annual revenue of the company is estimated to be $4M.
The e-commerce platform is a pure-play horizontal marketplace on which wholesalers and manufacturers can sell their products to retailers. The company currently focuses on three categories- Electronics, Clothing, and FMCG and staples.
Competitors
Tradekosh, BigTrade, Unicommerce, Tinydeal were some of the leading competitors to Udaan.
The company achieved a unicorn status with the grit and hard work. Despite inefficiencies in logistics, sales, and other phases, Udaan believed that these kind of challenges are common but following the right approach and tech-enabled techniques help to deliver the perfect output by solving the inefficiencies.
Today, the company delivers to over 500 cities and picks up from sellers over 80 cities through third party logistics. It is the best platform to grow the firms either small or medium even as you buy or sell for future business. Udaan’s mobile app connects nearly 150,000 traders, retailers, wholesalers in India. It offers from electronics and consumer goods for sale to industrial goods, fresh fruits and vegetables, office supply, fashion accessories, men and women wear, Food and FMCG.
No wonder ‘Udaan’ won the race against many startups and soon entered into unicorn club.
