Indonesian-headquartered online grocer HappyFresh made its Series C round official. The startup raised USD 20 million in an investment round led by Mirae Asset-Naver Asia Growth Fund, with strategic partners such as LINE Ventures, Singha Ventures, and Grab Ventures joining in.
HappyFresh entered a partnership with Grab in September 2018, where customers can shop for groceries directly from Grab’s app. HappyFresh provides the technical backbone and logistics for that service, called GrabFresh, but it also operates its own standalone app.
The service is available in Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia. In Malaysia, there’s no integration with Grab yet, although that’s a possibility in the future, HappyFresh CEO Guillem Segarra told KrASIA.
HappyFresh operates its own delivery fleet and staff that pick the fresh groceries from partnering supermarkets. In Jakarta, the fleet size is “in the thousands,” Segarra said. HappyFresh’s tech-driven routing and dispatch system mean the firm can assign drivers efficiently so that they are “utilized pretty much 90% of the time”, he added. One rider covers a cluster, which consists of a group of different stores and supermarkets.
While the adoption of online grocery shopping still remains low, with only about 1% of shoppers giving it a try, Segarra thinks the business will boom in the not-too-distant future.
“In China, now they are at 7–10% online groceries adoption. In places like Korea, it’s at 20%. In Indonesia or Southeast Asia as a whole, we are now at almost 1%,” Segarra said.”Just 2-3 years ago, we were at 01%” According to HappyFresh’s indicators, the market share for online groceries purchases will grow to 4% to 6% in the next couple of years.
“Groceries make up 25% of household expenditures in Indonesia, it’s a big category. For comparison, electronics is 8%. But groceries is one that takes longer to mature,” he said.
With the new funding round, HappyFresh plans to fuel city and country expansions, as well as invest in technology and hire specialists in data science and omnichannel technology.
HappyFresh’s Series B funding was led by Samena Capital, while it’s series A round came from Vertex Ventures.
Editor: Brady Ng