Hyderabad’s Nukkad Shops makes groceries more efficient

In the past few years, digitisation and technology has surely made our lives a lot easier and convenient. Starting from buying garments to daily groceries, technology startups have not left any stone to make anything and everything available at the click.

However, while supermarkets and big stores are able to adopt the changing technologies with a lot of ease, our small neighbourhood grocery stores have unconsciously been left behind. With a pursuit to make the grocery store owner more efficient and keep them on par with their bigger counterparts, Varanasi-born Vivek Shukla founded Nukkad Shops in 2016 along with three other founders Niranjan Kumar, Kulshekar Reddy and Vinod Nair.lick of a button.

Having spent most of his life in smaller towns and cities like Alwar in Rajasthan, Shukla was always fascinated by the workings of the small he was also clear that he never wanted to work for someone but wanted to become an entrepreneur himself. So after working for a gaming company, Shukla moved to Hyderabad to work for an IT company and that is when the idea of Nukkad Shops started germinating in his mind.

“We started working on the idea at the end of 2015 and by beginning of 2016 we started exploring the concept in a full-fledged manner. We started hiring people and building the core team apart from getting funding from external sources. We first built a high-end product called the Nukkad Shops Elite – targeted for bigger supermarkets and completely different from the basic software that they normally use. Our approach is very similar to that of Tesla who first launched a supercar and are now exploring lower-end versions,” says Shukla without divulging details about the funding raised so far.

The workings of the company is pretty simple. Nukkad Shops provide the whole ecosystem for the retailer to become digitally independent and as part of this, it provides smart point-of-sale devices, printer and software through which the owner can monitor the inventory, the purchaser will get a list of items available in the shop and the whole billing system becomes seamless.
Meanwhile, for the customers the company provides with an app to book day-to-day groceries, get it home delivered and also keep an e-bill in case of return or exchange. It has three different solutions based on segmentation – Nukkad Shops Elite, Nukkad Shops Pro (segment B retail stores) and Nukkad Shops Aspire (segment C retail stores). While segment B refers to mid-range retail stores with a larger inventory, segment C refers to smaller stores.

“We started the commercial operations of the company in 2017 and since then we have on-boarded 2,000 retailers from Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi. We have a footprint of two million customers along with 60 channel partners who take care of our sales in different cities,” Shukla informs.

Going ahead, the company has set a target of on-boarding 5,000 retailers by end of this year. In terms of channel partners, it is looking at partnering with 200 channel partners by end of this year who will cater to its sales need in tier-2 and 3 cities. Currently, about 70 per cent of its retailers are from cities and remaining from tier-2 and 3 cities. However, going ahead Nukkad Shops plans to change this ratio to 50:50 by end of 2018.

In terms of future funding, Shukla says, “Although we are comfortable with the money we have now, but we are looking at raising Series A funding of $5 million this year and we will be starting the negotiating process very soon. The funding will be useful to get into all the major cities by end of this year starting with Chennai, Kolkata and Pune.”

According to the founder India has about 1.5 crore retail stores and 15 per cent of these are ready for their solutions.