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How Dunzo is heading towards instant grocery delivery

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Anwesha Singha
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How Dunzo is heading towards instant grocery delivery

Kabeer Biswas

According to the IBEF, The services sector not only accounts for the majority of India's GDP, but it has also garnered considerable foreign investment, contributed significantly to exports, and provided widespread employment. 

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The services sector in India includes a wide range of activities such as trade, hotels and restaurants, transportation, storage and networking, financing, insurance, real estate, business services, community, social, and personal services, and construction services.

The Indian services sector remains the engine of growth for the Indian economy, accounting for 53% of India's Gross Value Added at current prices in FY22 (until January 2022). 

GVA in India's services sector increased 11.43 percent year on year to Rs. 101.47 trillion (US$ 1,439.48 billion) in FY20, up from Rs. 68.81 trillion (US$ 1,005.30 billion) in FY16. Financial, real estate, and professional services grew at a CAGR of 11.68 percent (in Rs. terms) between FY16 and FY20, while trade, hotels, transportation, communication, and broadcasting-related services grew at a CAGR of 10.98 percent (in Rs. terms). 

Dropshipping is a product delivery method that does not necessitate a company to keep products in stock. Instead, the store sells the item and forwards the sales order to a third-party supplier, who ships the order to the customer.

However, the dropshipping business model is not a get-rich-quick scheme, contrary to popular belief.

Sure, it appears to be easy money — you sell other people's goods and take a cut — but when you consider all of the drawbacks, obstacles, and day-to-day management, it's far from easy and can be difficult work.

We all want to live hassle-free lives, and smartphones can help us achieve that goal. Mobile apps have provided us with levels of freedom and opportunity that were unimaginable even a decade ago. Product delivery is one example of how radical innovations in mobile apps have streamlined the process. However, pick and drop services in India were relatively expensive, chaotic, and inconvenient, dominated by unorganized players until Dunzo introduced its promising delivery services at low prices.

Overview

In India, Dunzo is a hyper-local on-demand delivery service. It delivers everything on-demand with minimal delivery fees. For example, if you leave your lunch box at home, Dunzo can deliver them to you. Furthermore, suppose you want to buy a gift from a shop but are unable to do so because of some issue, Dunzo will go out and get it for you. So how crazy is this?

Dunzo also has partnerships with a few restaurants, clothing stores, and general stores. It currently provides services in Bengaluru, New Delhi, Gurugram, Pune, Chennai, Mumbai, Jaipur, and Hyderabad.

Dunzo is beneficial for people who choose not to go out or cannot go out for whatever reason and want to buy or deliver something over.

The parent company of the hyper-local demand delivery service startup Dunzo is Dunzo Digital Private Limited. It was founded on July 8, 2014, and is currently registered with the Registrar of Companies in Bangalore.

Services offered by Dunzo

  • Online restaurant discovery
  • Medicine Delivery
  • Grocery Delivery
  • Local Couriers
  • Pick up and drop
  • Online Ordering
  • Laundry Delivery
  • Bike Taxi

The Inception

After landing in Bangalore within six months Kabeer Biswas started to lose interest in the city so he decided he needs to embark on a business journey to keep him not bored.

He decided to put a new business idea based on a to-do-list product to the test. That's how the seed was sown, Dunzo was born,

Dunzo's headquarters became his small room in a duplex. He then began telling his friends about the concept, which quickly became popular. Kabeer soon began running errands for people on his bike and making deliveries all by himself. People messaged him on WhatsApp, and he made sure their task was completed.

Starting from a duplex now Dunzo is in business across India with approximately 900+ employees working for the dropshipping startup. What an amazing achievement.

Dunzo was conceived by Kabeer Biswas. At the age of 28, he decided to save people's time and started the plans for Dunzo. He is an engineer who graduated from Mumbai University and earned his Master's degree from the Narsee Monjee Institute of Management in Mumbai. He began working as a product and sales manager for Airtel in 2007. Kabeer later worked in the New Product Development and Product divisions of Y2CF Digital Media and Videocon Telecommunications before founding Dunzo. Kabeer is currently the CEO of Dunzo.

Ankur Agarwal, an IIT Roorkee computer science graduate, is the co-founder of Dunzo. Ankur worked at Google with the third co-founder, Mukund Jha, and the two also started an HR tech company called 'Filter.'

Mukund Jha is the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Dunzo. Jha earned his BTech., Computer Science from Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology before going on to earn his Master's in Computer Science from Columbia University, where he also worked as a research assistant before joining Google as a software engineer. He worked as a software engineer for less than three years before launching Wisdom.ly and Habet in 2013 and 2014, respectively. He co-founded his third company, Dunzo, with Ankur, Kabeer, and Dalvir.

Dalvir Suri, a BE Information Technology graduate from Mumbai University's Sardar Patel Institute of Technology, is another Dunzo Co-founder. Dalvir previously worked for IBM as an Application Developer as well as a Security and Privacy Consultant. Following that, he worked as the Head of Operations and Delivery at Cybrilla Technologies before co-founding Dunzo in May 2015.

Business Model of Dunzo:

Dunzo operates via an app and a website. It offers personalized experience on-demand in the hyper-local market. The app meets all of your requirements. Dunzo provides home groceries, food, medicines, pet supplies, health and wellness, gifts, bike rides, pick and drop, laundry delivery, and a variety of other categories/services.

Dunzo operates on a data-driven model that connects a delivery person with the nearest user who asked for a  service. This person's activity can be tracked throughout the delivery. When making a purchase, users can even use the chatbox to send relevant images of the specific product and communicate accordingly.

Dunzo cash and other digital payment options are also available. Dunzo's platform employs Artificial Intelligence to provide users with a satisfying and smooth experience.

Financials and growth of Dunzo:

Dunzo has raised $368.4 million in total funding across 16 rounds. On January 6, 2022, Dunzo raised $240 million in a funding round led by Reliance Retail and a slew of other existing investors including Alteria, Light rock, Lightbox, Alteria Capital, and others. Reliance Retail also confirmed that it will own 25.8 percent of the company with its $200 million investment. The previous Series E funding round totaled $40 million, with contributions from Google, LightBox, and others.

The highly anticipated Reliance funding is now a reality. According to reports dated October 21, 2021, this would move Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani closer to his dream of building the Reliance super app.

Beginning in 2015 on Whatsapp, when users typed their needs and Dunzo promptly delivered them, to now, when Dunzo is praised as an all-in-one 24X7 delivery ecosystem to pick and deliver just about anything within the city, the growth is right in front of us. It is now available in 8+ cities across India, having expanded into Chennai in 2018 after beginning operations in Hyderabad the same year.

The company recently launched Dunzo Daily, a new dark store that began in Bengaluru and is designed to be a grocery delivery. It is based on a dark store model that is a micro-fulfillment center dedicated to completing online orders quickly. It's like a small, neighborhood store, but without the customers. It has grocery aisles with shelves and racks.

 According to recent updates, Dunzo Daily will also launch in Pune in February 2022 and will have stores in over ten Indian cities by the first half of 2022. According to reports dated April 7, 2022, Dunzo's service will also operate in the satellite towns of Navi Mumbai and Thane. Dunzo Daily is now available in four cities: Bengaluru, Chennai, Mumbai, and Pune, with plans to launch in Hyderabad and Delhi NCR later in April 2022.

Dunzo Daily is currently growing at a rate of 100 percent month on month and is relying on its strong supply chain to streamline operations. Dunzo's fresh fruits and vegetable delivery service is now aiming for 200 mini-warehouses, 30,000+ delivery partners, and a daily order volume of 2 lakh by June 2022.

Dunzo's growth highlights:

  • The company has offices in eight Indian cities.
  • Dunzo is supported by the IT behemoth Google.
  • In addition, the company operates a bike taxi service in Gurugram.
  • Dunzo has grown 40X in the last two years, as reported in March 2021.
  • Dunzo Daily has been discovered to be growing at a rate of 25% per week.
  • Google-backed In FY21, Dunzo increased its revenue by 1.6X while cutting expenses by 43 percent.
  • The company is currently growing by 10-15% month after month.

Dunzo also has acquired associations with companies in collaboration with PepsiCo Dunzo could now deliver four different food products manufactured by the PepsiCo subsidiary brand Frito-Lay, which are Lay's, Kurkure, Doritos, and Quaker, thanks to this partnership, which was announced on May 26, 2020.

Dunzo then collaborated with LeadSquared to improve the efficiency of its onboarding process for new retail outlets on the platform. Furthermore, this partnership, which was formed on June 23, 2020, will provide them with a broader reach and local delivery services. In September 2021, it announced a partnership with Zee5 and AltBalaji to promote Dunzo Daily.

Competitors

In this sector, there is head to head fight. There are a lot of players in the industry like:

  • Jugnoo
  • Glovo
  • FetchrGrofers
  • Rappi
  • Wolt
  • Uber Technologies
  • BigBasket
  • Swiggy
  • Zomato
  • Zepto

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