Five-month-old PepperTap raises $10 million to deliver groceries in 10 more cities

BENGALURU: Five-month-old hyperlocal grocery delivery startup PepperTap has raised $10 million in Series A funding, led by existing investor Sequoia Capital and SAIF Partners.

The Gurgaon-based company will use the money to fuel expansion into 10 more cities by the end of the year, including Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune.

"This investment will help us iron out any chinks in our armor, and build on our strengths to take our business from a single-city operation to a pan-India scale," said co-founder Navneet Singh.


PepperTap currently has 15,000 product lines listed in its directory and completes more than 300 orders a day. It works with around a dozen grocery partners, from whom it charges a percentage of each order, and does not own any inventory of its own.

According to Shailendra Singh, managing director of Sequoia Capital India, the venture capital firm agreed to invest in the startup before the name was even finalized. "We liked Navneet so much and had such great chemistry that we felt we could partner with him to solve a very tough problem in a very large market. So we agreed to launch a grocery delivery business with him," he said.

This development comes on the heels of major funding rounds being announced for PepperTap's competitors over the past week, including $35 million for Delhi-based Grofers, which also delivers pharmaceutical products, and $10 million for Bengaluru-based ZopNow, which pivoted from a warehousing model to deliver only for Hypercity stores in four cities.