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Udaan: India’s Biggest Digital Wholesaler
Udaan, Reliance Retail and India’s Kirana Wars
My name is Mikal — I’m an early-stage tech investor and I was born in Asia, grew up in Africa and now live in the US. Every week I break down a fast-growing business in an emerging market to understand its product, market and growth strategy.
This week I’m breaking down Indian B2B wholesaler Udaan. This piece was originally published here.
Within the next decade India will overtake China to become the most populous country in the world. Today India’s population is 1.38 billion and this is expected to reach 1.5 billion by 2030 and peak around 1.65 billion in the middle of this century. The enormous growth of India’s population — from just 370 million in 1950 — has created a massive and fast-growing retail market. Consumer spending in India is forecast to hit $3.6 trillion in 2021, more than 4x what it was a decade ago.
Today Indians buy most of their home goods — food, spices, clothes, shoes and more — from small mom-and-pop retail stores known as kiranas locally. There are over 12 million of these kiranas across India and they are the center of India’s retail market. Over the last few years momentum has been growing to digitize the operations of these kiranas, in particular, their sourcing and purchasing of wholesale products to stock their shelves with. The leader driving this trend is Udaan which is pioneering the digitization of kiranas across India and dominates the market.
Udaan is a business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce marketplace in India connecting brands and manufacturers with kiranas across the country, and its mission is to digitize the wholesale purchasing and sourcing for kiranas across India.
Udaan was founded in 2016 and since then has grown to jaw-dropping scale in just four years:
- Reached $2.1 billion in gross merchandise value (GMV) in 2020
