SuperK, a tech-enabled grocery retail chain for small towns, has raised ₹6 crore in Seed funding, led by Strive VC, which it plans to use the fund to expand infrastructure, improving technology and hire talent.
The round also saw participation from Firstcheque, Ramakant Sharma & Syndicate, serial entrepreneur Srinivas Anumolu, Anand Chandrasekaran (ex-Snapdeal Chief Product Officer/Facebook Director), Lalit Keshre (CEO at Groww), Rajan Bajaj (CEO at Slice), Sampad Swain (CEO at Instamojo) and others.
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Neeraj Menta, Co-Founder at SuperK said, “Our mission is to bring modern retail experience to the smallest of towns in India by empowering entrepreneurs from these towns to own and operate supermarkets. Most other start-ups that are helping retailers are only providing tools to these stores while we are driving outcomes by using the technology. We have spent the last 1.5 years validating and tweaking our business model and with a strong operating playbook in place, we are now investing in logistics infrastructure and tech products to improve and scale our network of stores”.
Founded in December 2019 by batchmates at BITS Pilani — Neeraj Menta and Anil Thontepu — SuperK aims to empower small format retail stores across the country. Menta had earlier co-founded Hungerbox and built products at Flipkart and Zeta, while Thontepu previously led product management at Kaodim (a services marketplace in Malaysia), prior to which he managed growth at Hike and Phonepe.
Nikhil Kapur, partner at Strive said, “This (funding) allows SuperK to scale much faster than any other retail chain. A scalable business model with a strong tech background of the founders will make SuperK the largest retail chain of the country in the next 10 years”.
Grocery retail is a $600 billion market in India and small towns (Tier-II and below) account for more than 80 per cent of the grocery market but only less than 2 per cent is currently with organised retail chains.
