E-commerce firm Udaan raises $340 million ahead of planned IPO in 2025: Report

Udaan, a business-to-business e-commerce platform that has operations across categories such as lifestyle, electronics, home & kitchen, staples, fruits and vegetables, FMCG, pharma, toys and general merchandise, has reportedly raised $340 million ahead of its planned initial public offering (IPO) in 2025. The e-commerce firm plans to strengthen its supply chain and boost vendor partnerships with the fresh funding. 

According to a report in Bloomberg, the Series E funding round was done through a combination of fresh equity and conversion of debt. The funding round was led by M&G Plc and saw participation from existing investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners and DST Global.

Udaan co-founder and CEO Vaibhav Gupta, said that this funding funds their business plans and positions them well to be public-market ready in the next 12-18 months. 

According to McKinsey & Co, the kind of digital-led wholesale business that Udaan focuses on to help mum-and-pop stories get quicker deliveries by cutting the middlemen out, is expected to increase to a $150 billion in sales in a decade. 

Udaan is planning an IPO in 2025, but it is still undecided if it will go public in India or overseas. 

Udaan was founded in 2016 by three IIT alumni, Amod Malviya, Sujeet Kumar and Vaibhav Gupta, who had also worked at Flipkart. Amod Malviya, a BTech in Electrical Engineering from IIT-Kharagpur headed technology at Flipkart, Sujeet Kumar, a BTech in Civil Engineering from IIT-Delhi was the President of Operations at Flipkart, and Vaibhav Gupta, a BTech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT-Delhi, had held several leadership roles over a 5-year period at Flipkart.

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