I want to know if I should work towards getting VC funding

NoBroker began in a crowded yet large industry, to build a tech-based, brokerage-free real estate platform.

Like its competitors, finding profitability has been tough - while it has tripled its revenue each year, even in FY20 its losses were almost 3 times its revenue!

Yet, the company raised $210 million, last week, raising its valuation from $350 million (in April 2020) to $1 billion, becoming India’s first prop-tech unicorn.

VCs have still shown interest, likely due to the general positive funding climate, but also because of NoBroker's foray into gated society software, NoBrokerHood, that shows potential for various business models to be laid on top of it.

The plans to aggressively expand into 50 cities and to build its software platform are interesting moves, but this remains a tough & competitive space. So, only time will unfold its future outcome :)

PayTM is raising 18,300 crores at >INR 1 lakh crore valuation ⇒ Biggest ever IPO in India

Existing investors are selling shares to the tune of ~10,000 crores

PayTM is still loss-making and has been able to list in India due to SEBI allowing such companies to list in India

While it has shown strong top-line growth, it is in a highly competitive space which also faces uncertainties from regulators.

All big brands fighting to get a piece of the quick commerce pie.
- Zepto raised $100M in 45 days after raising $60M
- Swiggy put $700M into Instamart
- Reliance put $220M into Dunzo
- BlinkIt raised $100M from Zomato in 2021

So, the baseline for grocery delivery time has been revised to 10 minutes now. Similarly, you also have to offer free delivery & discounts if you have to stay in the race.

Competition is making these startups do things they otherwise possibly won't. Look at Zomato. The company was already competing with Swiggy in the food delivery space but now it's going head-on to challenge Swiggy's 10-min delivery startup Instamart.

Zomato is going all-in to bail out a bleeding company — BlinkIt, in a $700M deal to get its own 10-min grocery delivery startup.
But, what are these startups trying to achieve?

Well, the biggest argument for quick grocery delivery is that it will bring in a long-term behavourial change in consumers, which can hopefully never be reversed. So, the bet is, once you are used to having groceries delivered in 10-min, you can't go back to the old ways.

But, what's wrong with this assumption?
- Well, in day-to-day life it rarely happens that you need grocery items to be delivered right away.
- Plus making money heavily depends on having a higher-order value which is not the case with these startups.

Now, even if these startups overcome both these problems, yet the fear of losing customers to competitors still remains.

Overall, it's surely an uphill battle for quick delivery startups to survive and eventually make money.
For now, though, enjoy the luxury of getting your groceries delivered at the blink of an eye 😉