Milkbasket: Your doorstep grocer

If you find stepping out for grocery shopping annoying, there's help at hand. Milkbasket, a Gurgaon-based e-commerce company, promises to make it easy for you. Be it delivering your daily bottle of milk, fresh loaf of bread or a basket of farm-fresh fruits and vegetables and daily groceries, all right at your doorstep.

Founded in early 2015 by Anant Goel, Ashish Goel, Anurag Jain and Yatish Talvadia, Milkbasket operates on a subscription-based model. It also allows users to place or modify their orders till midnight for a guaranteed 7 am doorstep delivery.

Serving across 15 clusters in Gurgaon, with each having a user base of 500, Milkbasket is planning to gain a stronghold there, before expanding to other places, in a phased manner. It recently raised $500,000 (Rs 3.3 crore) in a pre-Series-A round of funding from EVC Ventures and a clutch of Chinese investors. The funds would go into expanding its core team from the current four to approximately 12, augmenting technologies and logistics.

The company offers 3,000 products through a hybrid inventory model to maximise product margins, while controlling costs. In the next six months, it aims to increase its headcount to a 250, from 30 today, with 80 per cent of the workforce in logistics and serving over 15,000 orders a day across 100 clusters in Gurgaon.

Milkbasket has been clocking an average monthly GMV (gross merchandise value) of Rs 15 lakh. In the next five to six months, it is planning to grow 30 times, with a target to hit Rs 4.5 crore in monthly GMV. It hopes to achieve operational break-even during this period and become profitable in five to six months after that.