MaxWholesale, a business to business e-commerce platform for kirana stores to source online inventory has raised $3 million in a Series A round led by venture capital fund IAN Fund-I and Al Falaj Investment Company, an Abu Dhabi-based private family office.
Existing investor Maple Capital, former Infoedge CFO Ambarish Raghuvanshi, Maple Capital’s Abhinav Grover and Biba Group’s Siddharth Bindra, among others, also participated in the round.
The Gurugram-headquartered firm said on Tuesday that IAN co-founder Raman Roy and Mohamad J. Abdelghani, Director of Business Development at Al Falaj Investment Company, have joined the board of MaxWholesale as directors.
MaxWholesale will use the funds to hire talent to develop its technology further and accelerate growth, it said. At present, the platform services 10,000 kirana stores in Delhi and manages warehouses in Delhi NCR with a delivery fleet of 60 vehicles in Delhi, Gurugram, Noida and Ghaziabad. MaxWholesale is also looking to expand its reach to more kirana stores in the next few months.
“Kirana stores in India form the backbone of Indian retail by market share. The time is apt for the Kirana industry to have the same technology-led advantages as major retail chains,” IAN’s Raman Roy said.
MaxWholesale was co-founded in July 2016 by Samarth Agrawal and Rohit Narang.
“We felt that there was a dire need for technology in this sector and hence, we introduced data science into this field to make restocking more predictable and organised. With this approach, we are aiming to change the way in which the business is done at these stores,” said Agrawal, CEO of MaxWholesale. “We will soon open up our ecosystem to NBFC lenders also for providing credit and working capital loans to our kirana stores,” he added.
