Saurabh Kumar founded Grofers along with Albinder Dhindsa in January’14. Saurabh is a graduate of IIT Bombay and University of Texas in Austin. Grofers is an on-demand delivery service from stores around you. The service is currently available in Delhi NCR, Mumbai and BangalorePrior to starting Grofers, Saurabh was heading operations at Rasilant Technologies. He has experience in transportation and logistics, having worked as a consultant in New York in the same domain for four years.Albinder is a graduate of IIT Delhi and holds an MBA from Columbia University. He was heading international operations for Zomato for three years before founding Grofers.
Saurabh says that they went in with a very set mind-set on the kind of deliveries they will or they won’t do. They started working with chemists, grocers, organic food retailers, laundry shops and soon realized that it will be important for them to have a tech solution that would help them manage the deliveries better. They also found that not only local merchants need organized logistics solution but also the end user who wants delivery service to be easy and pleasant.
Saurabh recollects that in order to address the needs of merchants and the end user, they built a mobile based solution for both these stakeholders. The merchants could place an order the mobile app just by tapping the pickup and drop-off location. For the end-user, they built a new Android application that they can use to order from multiple retailers and get things delivered within 90 minutes. The users can order various products from a range of groceries, vegetables to flowers in a single order and we take care of the rest.
Saurabh’s advice to early stage startups – It will never be an easy ride – Just be persistent
Grofers started in Jan’14 and since then they now employ over 180 people out of which 140 are spread across the city, shuttling over 1500 deliveries a day from local stores to consumers.
Backed by Sequoia Capital, they are currently partners with over 150 merchants across NCR, Mumbai and Bangalore and scaling fast. In November’14, they clocked 33,000 orders in total.
