B2B food and grocery marketplace Jumbotail raises $85 million in its Series C round

• ByTejika Bajaj     |    December 22, 2021

A leading new retail platform and B2B ecommerce marketplace for food and grocery products, Jumbotail, has raised an $85 million in a Series C round led by Artal Asia Pte Ltd, an affiliate of Invus. Ajax Capital, the family office of veteran FMCG entrepreneur Ajay Gupta, also participated in the round. This takes the total capital raised by the company to $125 million.

Jumbotail will use the funds to triple its engineering, product, design, data science, category management, marketing, and finance teams. It will also scale its core B2B marketplace to 100 cities and towns across India. It would expand its network of J24 stores and invest in large scale kirana entrepreneur skill development initiatives. It would also further strengthen its go-to-market services to support regional and new age FMCG brands.

“We nearly quadrupled our scale in 2021 and are looking to further accelerate our growth trajectory in the coming year,” said Ashish Jhina, co-founder and COO, Jumbotail. “We will continue to invest aggressively to make Jumbotail the pre-eminent destination for food and grocery brands to reach the overwhelming majority of India’s consumers through our pan-India network of kirana partners.”

Jumbotail was founded in Nov 2015 by Stanford MBA classmates S Karthik Venkateswaran and Ashish Jhina. Venkateswaran served with the Indian Army and is a marketplace tech/product veteran from eBay-US and Flipkart. Ashish Jhina is a 3rd generation apple farmer, and a former consultant with BCG, with deep experience in agricultural production and supply chains.

Francis Cukierman, managing director, Invus Asia and Benjamin Felt, managing director, Invus US will join Jumbotail’s Board of Directors. Cukierman and Felt said, “Jumbotail is rapidly emerging as an industry-defining company in B2B e-commerce. We share Ashish and Karthik’s vision of digitising kirana stores to transform India’s food and grocery retail landscape at scale.”

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