Exclusive: BigBasket acquires RainCan, begins microdelivery vertical under BBdaily brand

BigBasket has finally kicked-off micro-delivery (aka milk-tech) vertical by the name BBdaily. The company has been preparing for the morning delivery service for past couple of months and was in talks to take over RainCan.

Now, the Pune-based microdelivery startup has confirmed its acquisition by the Alibaba-backed company. Entrackr had exclusively reported about the potential acquisition of RainCan as well as Bengaluru-based Morning Cart by BigBasket.

According to a notification sent by RainCan (see feature image), it's rebranding to become BBdaily. “RainCan will get rebranded to new name BBdaily in a few days,” notified RainCan to its users.

Sources indicate that similar sort of communication is underway from Morning Cart in Bengaluru. Morning Cart services a handful of areas in Bengaluru including Electronics City and Bellandur.

As of now, it’s not clear whether BigBasket would launch a separate app - BBdaily or just add it as an extended feature in the existing app.

With BBdaily, BigBasket would get into subscription model and deliver morning and breakfast essentials such as dairy, meat, bakery, perishables, staples on a daily basis.

Since building a loyal consumer-base has turned out to be difficult for e-grocers, BigBasket looks to create more stickiness and accelerate its overall scale via microdelivery service.

Over the past six weeks, a lot of action has been observed in the microdelivery segment. Besides Bigbasket, Swiggy is also launching similar platform sometime this year. For this purpose, it already had acquired Mumbai-based SuprDaily.

Kishore Biyani-led Future Group is also in fray with plan to launch the home delivery service for daily essentials.

So far, the microdelivery space has been dominated by Milkbasket and DailyNinja. While Milkbasket has scooped up over $10 million from Lenovo Capital, Unilever Ventures, Kalaari Capital and Blume, Sequoia-backed DailyNinja recently raised about $5 million led by Matrix.

With BigBasket and Swiggy throwing the hat in the segment, competition is certainly going to heat up. Milkbasket and Dailyninja will have to fight deep-pocketed rivals who won’t mind winning customers through discount and subsidy.

Going forward, it would be exciting to see how vertically focused startups fare up against the heavyweight