online grocery stores are gaining popularity in india due to sheer convenience ease of shopping and a fastgrowing market globally online grocery retail is growing nearly 7 times faster than onground formats and the indian market may soon catch up for one the indian retail industry is estimated to be worth over 500 billion one of the worlds top 5 markets and 3040 of the businesses will be in the online retail space over the next 7 years this presents a great opportunity for any form of etailing especially the egrocery space as of now grocery etailing in india is a largely unorganised space and poses a big challenge in terms of stiff entry barriers the traditional methods of inventory and logistics management call for intense cashburning a business condition most of the bootstrapped indian startups fail to meet moreover a series a funding crunch also compelled companies like mumbaibased shopveg to shut down operations therefore when another mumbaibased startup decided to start grocery etailing in the same year things were not looking too exciting for the newcomer but 22 months later localbanyacom has managed to set up mumbais first online supermarket and also raised series a funding for the next level of expansion although there were predecessors that attempted various models of grocery retail in the digital space and failed localbanya has adapted a lean business model that relies on a convenient mix of warehousing and cashandcarry this has reduced the startups dependence on capitalintensive operations and enabled it to put in place a thoroughly efficient supply chain in addition the company has adopted some unique measures to take customer convenience to the next level want to know more about localbanya and how it works here is a snapshot that captures the startups vision and viability who runs localbanya wwwlocalbanyacom a team of three cofounders karan mehrotra ceo rashi choudhary coo and amit naik cto karan is the brain behind localbanya and set up the entire infrastructure with just 14 employees he is a computer engineer and prior to starting up worked for his family business as a distributor for fmcg firms he has 11 years of work experience in varied fields from turning around a chain of restaurants to setting up metal fabrication plants to building a food distribution network amit holds an mba from iimlucknow and he is also a six sigma black belt from the american society for quality he had six years of top tier experience in adtech and earlier worked for directi and larsen toubro rashi holds a global mba from sp jain school of global management and brings four years of experience in retailing consulting and customer service prior to joining localbanya she worked with the raymond group the trio had been working on the concept for some time and the site went live in may 2012 localbanya is now in beta and the egrocer has over 130 employees operating across mumbai thane and navi mumbai what inspired the