SuperK, a franchised retail chain for small towns in India, has raised $6 million in a Series A round of funding led by Blume Ventures, a platform that gives early-stage funding to tech start-ups. This is the first fund raised by the Hyderabad-based start-up in the year 2024, according to Entrackr.
It also saw participation from Silver Needle Ventures, Veltis Capital, Atrium Angels, and some angel investors and syndicates. The funding will be used for investing in technology infrastructure, hiring, and scaling the platform to connect digital native brands with SuperK customers.
In March 2022, the company raised $5.5 million in a pre series A round that was led by former Flipkart cofounder Binny Bansal backed 021 Capital.
SuperK is a franchised retail chain for small towns in India, currently operating in over 80 Tier 3, 4, and 5 towns in Andhra Pradesh, serving more than 5 lakh families over the last four years, reads a company statement.
With SuperK, customers are moving from unorganized Kirana stores to a branded, organised retail experience where a majority of customers go through a self-service store for the first time, mentioned the company.
SuperK stores are typically between 500 and 1000 square foot walk-in stores, stocking around 2500 SKUs. Technology is a huge differentiator, making SuperK the only offline retailer in the country that has a full track record of customer behavior by collecting granular data at every purchase.
With technology, there is data personalisation that helps sell specific goods to the conusmers, as per the company statement.
Neeraj Menta, co-founder of SuperK, said, “Our customers have upgraded their lives since a SuperK store came up in their neighborhood; their grocery shopping has moved from a chore to a family shopping experience.”
Karthik Reddy, Blume Ventures, said, “We were tracking this space for a couple of years, and while the market was hot for Tier 3-4 towns, retail enabled by a tech supply-chain backbone, we saw SuperK’s dense approach in AP paying off dividends and delivering store-level profitability—we think it’s the right way to build modern trade for Bharat.”
Grocery retail is a $600 billion market in India. Small towns (Tier II and below) account for more than 80 per cent of the grocery market, but only less than 5 percent are currently with organised retail chains.
