Arjun Singh
To accelerate customer acquisition & retention, build brand salience, and hire the right talent
Bengaluru, April 12: Wildermart, a Bengaluru-based healthy and sustainable grocery store startup, has raised a USD 320K seed funding round from Angel Investors to accelerate customer acquisition & retention, build brand salience and hire the right talent. Wildermart has successfully attracted an interesting mix of investors who are prominent names across industries. The group of angel investors includes Sairee Chahal – Founder, Sheroes, Anand Rangaswamy, EX-CEO, Latam and UK Godrej Consumer Products Ltd., Sreenivasan Ramki, Gangs T Gangadhar, Sandeep Komaravelly, Anuroop Krishnan, Chetna Soni, Sunainika Singh, Aditya Krishna, Shivanandan Pare, Rohit Bhojaraj, Raj Narayan, Vikram Dani, Sid N., Abhinav Mathur, ShivramAnantharaman, Ashish Dutt and KedarGavane. Founded in 2021 by Shweta Thakur and Swaroop Mohan and launched by Maneka Gandhi, Wildermart was conceived out of the founders’ passion for mindful consumption as they live by that philosophy.
Wildermart is of its kind business built on the 3Ps of the Triple Bottom Line – People, Planet and Profit and offers over 1500+ products across 30+ categories. The products range from certified organic stapes to F&V, clean label artisanal packaged foods, and chemical-free personal and home care products. It is now rapidly growing from just an online store to having an omnichannel presence shortly.
Shweta Thakur, Founder, and CEO of Wildermart, said, “We feel very validated in our vision at this stage. We can’t wait to start realizing it. We play a role in accelerating the journey towards conscious consumption, and it would be our version of making a dent in the universe! We feel extremely fortunate to have got the kind of investors we have in this round. They all come with complementing industry expertise, and we are certain that this partnership will strengthen our value proposition.”
Shweta further added, “As a brand, we talk about slowing down, but we need to do that fast because the health of the people and the planet is deteriorating every passing minute. So the investment cycle is required for us to take this message out there faster. We have spent the last 11 months studying the market and understanding that there is a strong market fit for our offering. This angel funding will help us find the right customers and make them our early adopters. That will then snowball!”
Swaroop Mohan, Co-founder, of Wildermart said, “An average human anywhere in the world wants to live a slow life – most of us have that farm, beach, hill living in our heads. But in our fast world, we somewhere feel it’s unrealistic and impossible. So we take vacations to new places to get a bit of that story.”
Swaroop reiterated that “Wildermart, in its way, gives you an experience of that slow living without putting in any more effort than you do for your current fast life. And there’s a market for this everywhere! Wildermart has a national & global vision. This round of funding will help us set up our Bangalore foundation very strongly. This will give us a model which will then take us to pan India in the next few years. We are also contemplating expanding to international geographies in a short while. This is a solution that the whole world needs right now.”
The idea behind Wildermart is to create a purposeful brand and company. A brand that cares about what consumers consume, how they consume, where it comes from, and who gets affected. A brand that ensures that what everyone consumes is clean, good for health, gentle to the environment, kind to the animals, and conscious about the people involved in the process of production.
Sairee Chahal, Founder, of Sheroes, said, “Wildermart is the kind of company building the world I want to live in. Sustainable. Kind. Mindful. Profitable. Shweta is a committed founder leading the opportunity for conscious capitalism. Wildermart has seen the future, and they are building it, and I am proud of their work.”
Anand Rangaswamy, EX-CEO, Latam and UK Godrej Consumer Products Ltd. said, “Interacting with Shweta and seeing her passion for changing the world convinced me to invest in Wildermart. I see huge potential for this brilliant one-stop-shop for all vegan/ plant-based foods in India, and Wildermart has the first-mover advantage.”
Wildermart is an environmentally conscious company and offers organic, vegan, and natural products delivered with minimal plastic, all given in an EV. It is operational on the website as well as the app. It provides same-day delivery to customers. All the products are locally sourced. In just eight months, Wildermart has been a choice of 1300+ consumers, and the repeat consumer rate is around 35%. Wildermart is currently operational only in Bengaluru.
