Albinder Dhindsa is the co-founder and CEO of Grofers, an e-commerce platform based in Gurgaon, India that provides same-day delivery for groceries and other daily needs items. Dhindsa saw an opportunity to improve logistics for local merchants and started Grofers in 2013 to connect customers with neighborhood shops for delivery. Grofers has since expanded to 10 cities in India and raised $45 million in funding. It now fulfills around 6,000 orders per day and has over 1,000 employees.

1. Success Story
of Grofers
Success is not final; failure is not
fatal: It is the courage to continue
that counts.

3.  The 33-year-old young man – Albinder Dhindsa is Co-founder & CEO of Grofers.com.
 Grofers, with a current valuation of roughly $115 Million is a Gurgaon-based start-up e-
commerce platform which helps its customers with their daily shopping for products
such as Grocery, Bakery Items, Flowers, Fruits & Vegetables, Meats, Baby Care
Products, and many more!
 Albinder, unlike most other upcoming businessmen/women, was an accidental
entrepreneur, who had absolutely no intentions of getting into business, but because he
saw a huge gap in the market along with a lucrative opportunity, he simply couldn’t
control his urges to jump on to the entrepreneurship wagon.
 But at the same time, even though he is a first generation entrepreneur of his family, he
is known for the ways he does and is doing business.

4. THE PATH THAT LED TO GROFERS!
 Soon after completing his bachelors from IIT-D, Albinder began his career!
 He started working in 2005 as a Transportation Analyst at URS
Corporation and continued the same for almost 2 years. In 2007 he took his
first jump and moved to Cambridge Systematics as a Senior Associate and
went on to work with them for more than 3 years.
 In May 2010, Albinder decided to leave his job and moved to the United States
to work pursue his Masters in Business Administration. While he was at it, he
also joined UBS Investment Bank as an Associate in June 2011 for 3 months.
 After completing his studies, Albinder decided to move back to his home
ground to join Zomato.com as their new Head of International Operations, and
went on to create a pool of knowledge for himself, for almost 3 years. And
while he was at Zomato, he began working on his life’s most ambitious project
– Grofers!

5. THE STORY OF GROFERS!
HOW DID GROFERS HAPPEN?
 It all began when Albinder was in the US!
 He happened to meet Saurabh Kumar while working with Cambridge Systematics
and kept in touch with him since then, but with absolutely no intentions of any
entrepreneurial motive.
 Moving on, Albinder & Saurabh saw a huge gap in the logistics or rather the
delivery industry and could sense a huge untapped opportunity. They saw that most
of the transactions between the consumers and merchants in the hyper-local space
were still very unorganised.
 They also got a chance to speak to a few merchants and got to know that shops like
local pharmacies did 50-60 home deliveries in a day within three to four km radius,
and their real pain-point was delivery logistics.

6.  And it seemed that the merchants had built a solid customer base but were struggling to
provide a higher quality and reliable service, because they lacked have the scale to be
able to build the infrastructure.
 Hence, they quickly began ideating on building a platform that could prove to be a win-
win for all and would also fill the gap. And after laying the foundation for their start-up,
they first started – Onenumber in 2013!
 Now their initial idea was to provide an on-demand pick up & drop service from shops
around their neighbourhoods like pharmacy, grocery and restaurants for a customer. It
was basically a one-stop solution for customer’s local delivery needs.
 Even though they had restaurants on board, but still they saw that 90% of their orders
were coming from groceries and pharmacies. Taking a cue from this, they decided to
focus on only these two, quickly pivoted their model and also rebranded themselves
as Grofers – a hyper- local logistics company!

7. WHAT IS GROFERS.COM?
 Owned and operated by Locodel Solutions Private Limited; Grofers is a hyper-
local logistics company which provides an e-commerce platform for daily
shopping. The platform enables its customers to shop from their favourite
merchants in their neighbourhood and provides them with a delivery at their
doorstep within 90 minutes.
 In other words; by connecting the merchants to the consumers from their
neighbourhood, Grofers attempts to make the local shopping experience easy and
pleasant. They help deliver a range of more than 20,000 products spread across
various categories which include Grocery, Bakery Items, Flowers, Fruits &
Vegetables, Meats, Personal and Baby Care Products, Pet Care Items, Electronic
Accessories, etc! These deliveries can either be scheduled for instantly or for a
convenient time later.
 To be able to meet the delivery time, Grofers has built multiple stations across all
the cities they hold presence in. So whenever a customer places an order, it goes to
the merchant as well as to the relevant station, then somebody from the nearest
station picks up the order from the merchant and delivers it to the customer.
 The platform currently operates in a total of 10 cities: Ahmedabad, Bangalore,
Chennai, Delhi NCR, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, and Pune.

8. HOW DID GROFERS GROW INTO
BECOMING WHAT WE SEE TODAY?
 The company had now moved from a B2B (Business 2 Business) model to a B2C
(Business 2 Customer) model. And the real beauty of a model like Grofers was that, it
had endless possibilities of utilising a hyper-local delivery network.
 Now, Grofers was primarily born to solve a very basic problem – we have to go to the
nearby store for daily needs. And they had a pretty much sorted revenue model, wherein
they earned their revenues via commission from retailers.
 But when they began, they had to go through certain hurdles that are most common to
the ventures which are unique, one of which being – creating awareness!
 And as much as they were prepared that, convincing people that they could be trusted to
do deliveries for them, would be difficult but as they say, “it’s easier said than done!”
Gradually, by providing quality service, they began to gain customer loyalty and their
kitty started getting bigger.

9.  After such humungous developments in such a short time, today, when we look at their
market position; Grofers has grown on to be valued at $115 million.
 With an average ticket size of Rs. 560 & 400+ merchants, the company now clocks
roughly 6000 orders every day, which is tripling every month and has brought them to
book a turnover of Rs.1.8 Cr. approximately in the last fiscal. They have also increased
their employee strength to more than 1000 people, of which 700 are delivery boys.
 And lastly, talking about their funding; the company has raised a total of $45 Million
from Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global Management. These rounds include $35 Million
(2015), $10 Million (2015) and $500K (2014). (Source: Crunchbase)

10. ACHIEVEMENTS
 Grofers was named one of the top 10 start-up’s in
Delhi by YourStory.com (2014)
 Listed amongst the top 10 promising Gurgaon-
based start-up’s in 2014 by IndianWeb2.com