Udaan, an online marketplace for businesses, has raised $225 million (Rs 1,575 crore) from Russian internet billionaire Yuri Milner’s DST Global and Lightspeed Global Growth at a valuation of $1 billion, reported The Times of India.
At this valuation, Bengaluru-based Udaan has become one of the fastest Indian startups to enter the unicorn club, a moniker used for privately held startups that are valued at $1 billion or more.
The development comes more than six months after the startup raised $50 million in funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners US. The round also saw participation from funds associated with Milner. That time, Udaan had fetched a valuation of $200 million. The latest round has seen it’s valuation surge almost five time in less than a year.
In November 2016, Udaan, had raised $10 million in Series A funding from Lightspeed India and Lightspeed US.
Udaan was launched in November 2016 by Vaibhav Gupta, Amod Malviya, and Sujeet Kumar, former senior executives at Flipkart, and became fully operational last year. It is an end-to-end marketplace that connects businesses in consumer goods, fashion and electronics, offers logistics services and also started lending early this year.
Udaan is one of the many startups trying to tap India’s B2B e-commerce market potential. The overall B2B market size is expected to be around $700 billion by 2020, according to an April 2016 report by the Confederation of Indian Industry and Deloitte. Other startups operating in the space include Just Buy Live, Power2sme, and Moglix.
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