Blinkit, the online delivery platform formerly known as Grofers, is limiting its operations in India. The company announced Monday that it will only operate in locations where it can guarantee product deliveries to users within 10 minutes. Blinkit temporarily closes services in areas where it cannot make deliveries within the stated time frame. Grofers recently rebranded itself as Blinkit. Swiggy’s Instamart, BigBasket, Dunzo and Zepto are the company’s biggest rivals in space.
Albinder Dhindsa, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Blinkit, announced via a blog post the decision to discontinue its services in areas where it cannot offer faster deliveries. The Blinkit service is now only available in the areas where the company can be at users’ locations in 10 minutes (or less).
“In the short term, this call will have a significant impact on our business size and for many of our customers. We expect it to affect approximately 75,000 of the 200,000 daily customers we serve,” said Dhindsa.
He said the company is opening a new store every four hours and looks forward to serving all affected customers within four weeks. Users can update their exact location on the Blinkit app to see if they are currently usable.
Grofers, which started as an online grocer at the end of 2013, rebranded Blinkit as Blinkit last week. It had recently achieved unicorn status or $1 billion (approximately Rs. 7588 crore) in valuation, after raising more than $120 million (approximately Rs. 910.6 crore) from online food delivery platform Zomato and existing investor Tiger Global Management as part of a continuous increase.
The company, which until now mainly focused on grocery delivery, is said to have more than 100 partner stores or warehouses in eight cities. It also reportedly currently has 2,000 employees and processes more than a million orders per week, across 12 cities in India.
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