The Venture Codex

Led · Series D · Mar 2020

Taikee by Peel-Works is an online B2B grocery e-commerce platform serving kirana and corner stores, focused on reducing inventory procurement turnaround across a wide assortment of SKUs. The company provides supply-chain solutions and vendor finance to enable its supply partners and corner-store customers to remain competitive. Taikee announced a partnership with Grip Invest to lease warehousing racks and totes worth INR 1 crore via crowdfunding to lower logistics costs and support scaling. Management said it aims to scale operations to 30 cities and onboard 100,000 retailers by 2021. The company reported double-digit month-on-month growth since the COVID-19 outbreak and has been clocking a monthly turnover of over INR 100 crore since lockdown. Peel-Works expects to break even by the end of the fiscal year. Peel-Works is a B2B grocery ecommerce company and retail-management platform that enables corner stores to source a wide assortment from FMCG brands via its Taikee app. Founded in 2010 and headquartered in Mumbai, the company says it has direct tie-ups with leading FMCG brands and offers next-day delivery while addressing inventory, out-of-stock, and working-capital issues for retailers. Taikee consolidates ordering so retailers can buy from a single app instead of interacting with multiple brand salesmen. The company will use the proceeds to expand its presence beyond the top 10 cities where it currently operates, widen assortment, and cut fulfillment times. Prior to this fundraising, Peel-Works had raised about $15 million from investors including HDFC Bank, Chiratae Ventures, Unilever Ventures, and Indian Angel Network. Management is targeting EBITDA breakeven by the end of the current fiscal year. Peel-Works operates Taikee, a B2B ecommerce SaaS platform that supplies products to retail shop owners at lower cost and helps reduce inventory costs for kirana shops. The platform has over 10,000 downloads on Google Play and was operational in 16 cities, serving about 20,000 retailers. Peel-Works also provides allied services including data insights for brand managers, digitising invoicing and sales-force lifecycle management. The company faces competition from larger B2B players such as Udaan, Jumbotail and Flipkart-owned Ninjakart, though the sector still has room to grow as players have onboarded only a fraction of kirana shops. Financially, in FY19 its losses widened to Rs 19 crore from Rs 7 crore on total income of Rs 40 crore versus Rs 26 crore the prior year. Founded in 2010, Peel-Works has raised multiple prior rounds including a $5M Series B and tranches of Series C as well as debt financing. Peel-Works operates Taikee, a retail-management platform that predicts demand, localises inventory management, moves ordering online and integrates new data sources for small retailers. Taikee has around 20,000 registered retailers and services cities including Delhi/NCR, Mumbai, Jaipur, Chandigarh, Bengaluru, Pune, Mysore and Chennai. The company says Taikee helps retailers right-size assortments, buy cheaper and adopt technology to make transactions more convenient for shoppers. Peel-Works plans to use fresh capital to strengthen and expand the Taikee platform. The company was founded in 2010 by Sachin Chhabra and Nidhi Ramachandran. It has raised a $5 million Series B as reported in the articles. Peel-Works provides SaaS and big-data analytics solutions to enable salesforces, offering the SaaS product 9Yards and a big-data analytics platform called Genius. Genius organizes information, computes performance-based ratings and incentives, and uses predictive modeling to generate recommendations around promotions, skill and competency. The platform has been used by large and medium-size companies in FMCG, telecom, healthcare and BFSI sectors that operate with large indirect sales forces. Set up in 2011 by CEO Sachin Chhabra and based in Mumbai, the company secured $2M in a Series A. Backers included Inventus Capital Partners and IDG Ventures India, and Parag Dhol (Inventus) and Karan Mohla (IDG) joined the board. Peel-Works intends to use the funds to expand its offerings, hire senior management, ramp up technology and product development, and grow in global markets.