Nowadays buying groceries online is pretty common. Services like Instacart have popularized the idea of having groceries delivered to customers’ homes. Additionally, retailers such as Target, Walmart and Amazon have also added grocery delivery services that have helped users further adopt online grocery shopping. Chicago-based Quicklly is also an online grocer but, unlike the big-name retailers, it focuses on selling only one cuisine — South Asian foods — and has thrived doing so.
The company launched in 2018 and closed its first pre-seed round in March of last year. On Tuesday, Quicklly announced that it closed a $4 million seed round co-led by JAM Fund, Great North Ventures, Home Chef founder Pat Vihtelic and the co-founders of TechStyle Group Adam Goldenberg and Don Ressler.
Quicklly is an online marketplace and meal kit company offering more than 250,000 unique South Asian food items ranging from spices to mangos to roti. Items can be delivered nationwide. In Chicago and San Francisco, Quicklly also offers same-day delivery. In addition to selling its own sourced foods, the platform is also open for local vendors to list and sell their products through the online platform.
According to the company, over 300 local vendors currently use Quicklly for their e-commerce needs. Alongside getting access to the e-commerce platform, vendors also get analytics tools that can help keep track of inventory.
“We created Quicklly to simplify the lives of the nearly 5.4 million South Asians living in the U.S. by seamlessly connecting them to Indian and South Asian markets, restaurants and caterers,” Keval Rej, co-founder of Quicklly, told Built In over email in June. “We created Quicklly to give these businesses the technological resources to compete against the larger players by building their digital storefronts, expanding their consumer base and scaling their digital capabilities with a significantly lower fee structure.”
Quicklly, recently named a Built In Future 5 startup, is looking to expand its headcount to more than 50 full-time and contracted employees in order to achieve some of the company’s initiatives it plans to launch with the new capital. Those new initiatives include expanding its same-day delivery service to Austin, Seattle and Los Angeles in the coming months. Additionally, through its newly forged partnership with Instacart, Quicklly will also launch 90-minute grocery delivery in 12 cities across the country this year.
“We want to connect every pocket of America with the most authentic and delicious Indian flavors available. Whether our customers are in the heart of New Jersey’s Little India or thousands of miles from the nearest South Asian grocer, we want to provide them with ready and easy access to fresh, premium and delicious grocery items, meal kits, restaurant-prepared meals and more,” Raj said in a statement.
