Udaan History: Founding, Growth & Key Milestones

In late 2015, Amod Malviya, Sujeet Kumar, and Vaibhav Gupta left Flipkart after spending years building the e-commerce giant's core engineering, logistics (Ekart), and marketplace systems. While venture capitalists expected them to launch another consumer consumer-facing app, the three founders spent six months traveling by bus and train across small towns in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Tamil Nadu. In every town, they observed the same painful reality: small shopkeepers, who represented over 90% of India's retail trade, were trapped in an exploitative wholesale supply chain. A bar of soap or bag of lentils passed through four to six layers of regional distributors, wholesalers, and transport agents, inflating prices and forcing shopkeepers into heavy debt with local moneylenders who charged exorbitant monthly interest rates. In 2016, the trio incorporated Hiveloop Technology in Bengaluru to build Udaan. Starting initially as a logistics and messaging platform for small textile weavers in Surat and electronics dealers in Delhi, Udaan rapidly expanded into a full-stack B2B e-commerce platform with integrated payments and credit. Recognizing the notable caliber of the founding team and the sheer scale of the Indian B2B market, Lightspeed Venture Partners led early funding rounds. By September 2018, just 26 months after founding, Udaan raised a $225 million Series C round that valued the company at $1 billion, setting the record as the fastest Indian startup ever to achieve unicorn status.