Grocery app based Grofers will now be delivering Reliance’s new 4G smartphones LYF starting from January 29th. The three devices – Lyf Earth 1, Lyf Water 1 and Lyf Water 2 will be available on Grofers at over 150 stores across 13 cities.
Ludhiana, Bhopal, Kochi, Coimbatore and Visakhapatnam were among the 9 cities. “We ran a series of marketing campaigns including television ads in these cities to test the markets and see if the volume picks up. The smaller cities are not ready for hyperlocal business yet.” says, Grofers founder Dhindsa.
The company made a loss of INR 3.9 crores in FY14-15 compared to a loss of INR 2.8 lacs the previous fiscal. Largest expense head was ‘Employee Expenses’ at INR 2.2 crores.
Post this, the first change Grofers has done to its website is the removal of the word ‘trademark’ , as they don’t have a trademark on the name yet.The court has given the two companies 8 weeks to file original documents and the next hearing is on Feb 17th, 2016. Grofers is currently rumored to be raising $200mn round and last raised $35mn in April 2015.
The move is marked as a part of the scaling-up process at Grofers and is purely an acqui-hire, said Grofers. According to Grofers, they aren’t looking to continue the existing business lines of these companies, and no significant cash or equity is being exchanged.
The acquisition is primarily for the teams with no significant cash or equity-exchange, said an executive from Grofers to TOI. Grofers had recently acquired SpoonJoy, a Bangalore based food-tech startup. Grofers had previously raised seed rounds, and were reportedly in talks to raise fresh funds.