Chaldal raises $10 million in Series C funding

Online grocery store Chaldal has raised $10 million in its Series C round of funding. 

The investment was led by Wise Co-founder Taavet Hinrikus, Topia Chief Product Officer Sten Tamkivi, and Xploration Capital, with participation from Mir Group. 

With this new funding, Chaldal looks to expand to 15 new cities and plans to open 50 warehouses by the end of this year. 

In addition to its flagship grocery deliveries, Chaldal will expand GoGo Bangla — its on-demand logistics service for small e-commerce businesses — and the Chaldal Vegetable Network, which connects farmers directly to retailers. 

Chaldal also has plans to launch a direct-to-consumer pharmacy.

The e-commerce site was founded by Waseem Alim, along with Tejas Viswanath and Zia Ashraf in 2013. 

After working in product development for Wikinvest and SigFig, Alim began exploring the possibility of launching a startup in his home country.

Chaldal initially operated by picking up orders from local retail stores and then delivering those to customers.

Currently, Chaldal boasts 27 warehouses operating in the major cities of Dhaka, Chittagong, Narayanganj, and Jashore. 

It works directly with wholesalers and farmers, and big manufacturers like Unilever. 

Chaldal has generated $40 million in revenue and performed 2.5 million orders over the past 12 months, growing about 120% year-over-year, according to TechCrunch. 

The company sells about 8,500 kinds of products and wants to expand that to 30,000 stock-keeping units by December this year.

At present, Chaldal has a family of approximately 2,600 people. 

Last month it delivered 300,000 orders to 120,000 customers and average customers shop around 2.4 times (recurring), Alim had said in a recent interview with the Dhaka Tribune.

Chaldal has a good line up of investors backed by Y Combinator and 500 Startups, IDLC among others. Startup Bangladesh also made early investments in the e-commerce store.