Value retailer SuperK raises Rs 100 crore co-led by Binny Bansal, Mithun Sacheti; cricketer Shubman Gill joins as investor

SuperK, a value retail chain focussed on small towns of India, has raised Rs 100 crore in fresh capital from Flipkart cofounder Binny Bansal’s 3State Ventures and CaratLane founder Mithun Sacheti, according to a company statement on Thursday. Cricketer Shubman Gill and existing backers Blume Ventures and Xeed Ventures have also joined the round.

Founded in 2020 by former Flipkart executive Neeraj Menta and ex-PhonePe executive Anil Thontepu, SuperK currently operates 130 grocery retail stores on a franchisee model across more than 80 towns in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. Its focus is solely on tier-III and below towns, Menta told ET in an interaction, adding its biggest market is the Andhra town of Kadapa, which has a population of around 500,000.

“We know that there will be customers in big cities who will value what we’re building. But we want to remain focussed on our problem statement of building for smaller towns. Just in the two states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, we could build an annualised business of Rs 2,000-3,000 crore in the next four to five years. We want to focus only on tier-III and below towns,” Menta said.


SuperK’s latest funding round comes amid renewed investor interest in value retail startups aiming to expand across smaller towns, which are often underserved by larger retail chains. According to Menta, SuperK closed the round at a valuation of 2-2.5 times its previous valuation of Rs 160 crore last year.

In May, TPG NewQuest and A91 Partners backed value fashion retailer CityKart in a Rs 538 crore round comprising both primary and secondary transactions.

Franchisee-led grocery startup Apna Mart, which also focuses on tier-II and below geographies, raised $25 million (or around Rs 214 crore) in a mix of equity and debt funding from Nandan Nilekani’s Fundamentum, venture capital firms Accel, Peak XV Partners, and Sparrow Capital in March.

SuperK said that grocery retail is a $600 billion market in India, with small towns—tier II and below—accounting for more than 80% of the spend. It added that less than 5% of this market is served by organised retail, presenting a massive opportunity for tech-enabled formats that can scale up in these underpenetrated regions.

Growth plans

With the new funding, SuperK plans to expand its footprint to 300 towns across Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Karnataka. The startup is, however, doubling down on the franchise model—an approach that enables rapid expansion but also comes with its own set of challenges for retailers.

“If executed properly, the franchise model can unlock significant scalability and offer strong leverage to the business…but building that successfully is very difficult. Aligning hundreds of individual entities to a common standard operating procedure is no easy task. The rationale behind choosing this model was that bringing organised retail to very small towns is challenging for large companies, which is why many major players have stayed away from these markets,” Menta said.

He added that in fiscal 2025, the company clocked a growth of around 15% in revenue over Rs 85 crore posted in FY24. “Last year, we did not focus so much on growth. It was all about fixing scaling challenges…we had to take a pitstop and had a modest growth of around 15% during the year.”

Now, besides groceries, SuperK is also entering the broader general merchandise space, experimenting with products such as home appliances and smartphones. In these categories, it will start competing with the likes of IPO-bound ecommerce marketplace Meesho, which is focussed on small towns offering low average selling price products.

Menta said that SuperK has also rolled out a membership programme as a key strategy to build customer loyalty and repeat purchases. “We took inspiration from Costco and introduced a membership programme that offers customers the best value…on the condition that they commit to shopping for everything from us. If people cherry-pick and split purchases between us and others, we can’t sustain that value. Since launching the membership, footfall at our stores has doubled every month,” he said.