Startup Deep Dive : CityMall — how a Rs 534 crore grocery business raised money at a flat valuation

CityMall’s operating revenue climbed to ₹534 crore (about $56 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) in the year to March 2025, up from ₹427 crore the previous year, according to its standalone accounts filed with the Registrar of Companies and reported by Entrackr. It is a business that sells atta, sugar, cooking oil and ghee to households in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar through neighbourhood agents on WhatsApp. And yet, when it raised fresh money in September 2025, investors valued the whole company at exactly what they had valued it at three-and-a-half years earlier.

That single fact — growth without a re-rating — is the story of CityMall, and of the wider bet on selling online to India’s smaller towns. The company raised its $47 million Series D at a flat valuation of ₹2,780 crore, or about $316 million, the same figure it carried after its Series C in March 2022, per Entrackr; TechCrunch put the number at $320 million. In between, revenue roughly doubled, losses stayed put near ₹159 crore, and the founders learned that reaching 200 million new internet users is easy to describe and expensive to do. This is how the numbers actually add up.

Quick facts

What CityMall actually does

CityMall runs a community group-buying model aimed at households in India’s smaller towns, the segment most e-commerce apps struggle to serve profitably. Instead of shipping single parcels to individual homes, it recruits local micro-entrepreneurs — called community leaders — who take orders from neighbours through a WhatsApp storefront and the CityMall app, pool those orders, and hand out the goods when a single next-day delivery arrives from a nearby warehouse. The pitch to the customer is the one General Catalyst used when it invested: the price and range of a supermarket with the convenience of the local kirana. As of 2025 the company operated in more than 60 cities across Delhi NCR, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Uttarakhand and Bihar, according to TechCrunch, selling mostly groceries and household staples with average order values of ₹450 to ₹500 to customers earning roughly ₹15,000 to ₹80,000 a month.

The origin: hair curlers to Maggi

Angad Kikla and Naisheel Verdhan started CityMall in 2019 as engineers and repeat founders. Per company and Tracxn profiles, Kikla, an IIT Delhi graduate, had earlier co-founded the sales-analytics firm BeatRoute Innovations, while Verdhan, from IIT Roorkee, had founded the software consultancy Codalyze Technologies. Their first version of CityMall was not a grocery business at all. As Forbes India recounted, the pair experimented with group buying on WhatsApp and sold long-tail, low-cost imported goods — the example that gets quoted is cheap imported hair curlers. The insight that reshaped the company was mundane and, in hindsight, obvious: a packet of Maggi noodles was far easier to sell to far more people, far more often, than a novelty gadget. Everyday consumables carried the frequency the model needed. The founding thesis General Catalyst backed in mid-2021 rested on a gap rather than a gadget: e-commerce reached under 5% of Indian retail as of 2020, and within grocery the online share was below 0.5%. CityMall’s answer was to make a trusted local person, not a slick app, the face of that first online purchase.

The struggle years: two rounds of layoffs

The model that reads cleanly on a slide proved brutal to run at scale. CityMall cut staff twice in sixteen months. In June 2022, roughly 191 employees were let go, per Inc42. Then, on 16 October 2023, the company laid off about 90 more people across nearly every department, offering one month’s salary as severance; Inc42 reported the round was framed internally as a cost-cutting exercise carried out on the direction of investors, and described it as the most significant since June 2022. The layoffs came even though CityMall had closed funding rounds not long before — a sign the problem was not a lack of capital but the cost of moving perishable, low-margin goods to thinly spread rural demand. The other early scar was in the cap table itself: one of the original co-founders, Divij Goyal, departed in 2019, leaving Kikla and Verdhan to carry the company through the hard years.

The turning point: the pivot to staples

The decision that defined CityMall was not a funding round but a change in what sat in the basket. When the company leaned into everyday kitchen staples over long-tail discretionary goods, it traded glamour for repeatability — and the FY25 accounts show why that mattered. Sales of atta, sugar, oil and ghee alone reached ₹210 crore in the year to March 2025, contributing 39% of all product sales, per Entrackr’s reading of the RoC filing. Product sales overall rose 30% to ₹512 crore and made up close to 96% of operating revenue. In other words, the business that once tried to sell hair curlers now lives or dies on the price of flour and cooking oil. That is the quieter turning point: CityMall stopped trying to be an everything-store for Bharat and became, in the words of chief executive Angad Kikla to TechCrunch, an attempt to be “an equivalent of DMart in the online world” — a value-first grocer whose whole reason to exist is being cheaper.

The money behind it

CityMall’s funding history tracks the rise and cooling of the social-commerce trade. The major disclosed rounds:

• Seed: about $3 million in June 2020 (Forbes India).
• Series A: about $11 million in March 2021 (Forbes India; Entrackr).
• Series B: about $22.5 million in June 2021 (Entrackr).
• Series C: $75 million (₹574 crore) on 7 March 2022, led by Norwest Venture Partners, at a post-money valuation of roughly $320 million; Norwest put in ₹142.52 crore and Citius ₹112.52 crore, with Jungle Ventures, Elevation, General Catalyst, Waterbridge and Accel also participating (Entrackr).
• Series D: $47 million on 1 September 2025, led by Accel — about $41 million in equity plus debt — at a flat valuation of ₹2,780 crore ($316 million per Entrackr, $320 million per TechCrunch). Accel contributed ₹173.2 crore.

Named backers and what each signals:

• Elevation Capital — an early and continuing investor; lists CityMall in its portfolio and joined again at Series D.
• Norwest Venture Partners — led the $75 million Series C in March 2022, the round that set the valuation CityMall has since been unable to beat (Entrackr).
• Accel — led the September 2025 Series D and, via partner Pratik Agarwal, framed value grocery as “the largest consumer market in India” (TechCrunch).

Total capital raised is reported in a range: Inc42 puts it at about $159 million across seven rounds, while TechCrunch and YourStory cite roughly $165 million. Whichever figure is used, the more telling number is the valuation, which has not moved since 2022.

How CityMall makes money

CityMall is, at its core, a first-party grocery retailer with an outsourced last mile. The economics break down like this, per its FY25 RoC filing as reported by Entrackr:

• Money in: product sales dominate — ₹512 crore, about 96% of operating revenue in FY25, up 30% year on year. A smaller slice comes from logistics and marketing services and from interest on its cash pile (₹17 crore of other income in FY25).
• The take rate: because it buys and resells goods, the margin sits in the gap between procurement cost and selling price, minus what it pays community leaders as commission. Cost of procurement was ₹510 crore in FY25 — 72% of all expenditure and up 31% — which shows how thin the gross margin on staples is.
• Costs out: total expenses were ₹710 crore in FY25. Beyond procurement, transportation cost ₹56 crore and employee benefits ₹82 crore (down 10%, and including ₹16.5 crore of non-cash ESOP charges).
• Where people get it wrong: the community leader is not just a marketing channel — she is the delivery network. Aggregating a village’s orders into one drop is what makes rural delivery affordable at all. On average about 10 customers order through a single community leader, per General Catalyst.

The numbers

Three years of the CityMall accounts, drawn from RoC filings as reported by Entrackr, in ₹ crore:

Two caveats matter here. First, Entrackr’s own reports differ on FY24: its FY24 write-up put operating revenue at ₹391.5 crore (with gross revenue/GMV of ₹427 crore), while its later FY25 report used ₹427 crore as the FY24 operating-revenue base for a 25% growth figure — a classification difference between revenue from operations and gross merchandise value. The net loss for FY24 is likewise reported as ₹159 crore in the earlier article and ₹156 crore in the later one; the range is shown above. Second, aggregators such as Inc42 quote FY25 “revenue” of ₹551.2 crore and FY24 of ₹459.5 crore — these are total-income figures, which is why they run higher than the operating-revenue line. On any measure, the shape is the same: revenue rising at double digits while losses hold flat near ₹159 crore, for an EBITDA margin of about -30.3% in FY25.

Where the money comes from

The revenue mix reveals how narrow the business really is. By product category in FY25, per Entrackr’s reading of the filing:

• Atta, sugar, oil and ghee: ₹210 crore, or 39% of product sales — the single largest block.
• Branded food and beverages: about ₹85 crore.
• Home and personal care: about ₹58 crore.
• Other staples and miscellaneous: about ₹159 crore.

By geography, CityMall is concentrated rather than national. As of 2025 it operated in more than 60 cities across just five contiguous regions — Delhi NCR, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Uttarakhand and Bihar — per TechCrunch, a Hindi-belt cluster it can serve from a shared warehouse and logistics footprint. The surprise in the mix is how little of the money comes from anything other than kitchen basics: this is not a diversified marketplace but a bulk grocer whose growth depends on getting more households in the same towns to buy the same commodities more often. Reach has been built on people — the network grew to roughly 20,000 community leaders across eight towns by March 2021 (Forbes India) and about 30,000 leaders across 25 towns by the Series C period (General Catalyst).

The risks

CityMall’s disclosed and structural risks are concrete:

• Wafer-thin commodity margins: with procurement at ₹510 crore against ₹534 crore of operating revenue in FY25, and staples making up 39% of product sales, a small move in the wholesale price of flour or oil can erase the gross margin. A grocer competing on being cheapest has little room to absorb cost shocks.
• Persistent losses despite scale: losses have stayed near ₹156–159 crore across FY23–FY25 even as revenue grew, and the EBITDA margin was about -30.3% in FY25 (Entrackr). Management told TechCrunch it is “operationally profitable” but gave no timeline for overall profitability — and the flat valuation shows investors are pricing that uncertainty.
• Competition from deep-pocketed rivals: the same value-grocery and quick-commerce demand CityMall chases is targeted by far larger players; its Series D was explicitly framed by TechCrunch as a move to challenge ultra-fast-delivery giants. Cost discipline, evidenced by the two rounds of layoffs in 2022 and 2023, is not optional for a company this thinly capitalised relative to its rivals.

The takeaway

The transferable lesson from CityMall is that in low-margin retail for price-sensitive customers, the valuation follows the unit economics, not the growth rate. CityMall did the hard thing well — it built a real distribution network of tens of thousands of local agents and grew revenue to ₹534 crore selling flour and oil to towns most apps ignore. But growing a business and re-rating it are different achievements. Investors marked the company at roughly $320 million in 2022 and again in 2025 because what they were buying — a commodity grocer still losing ₹159 crore a year — had not fundamentally changed, only gotten bigger. For any founder chasing India’s next 200 million shoppers, the number to watch is not GMV or town count; it is the gap between what a packet of atta costs to buy and what a household will pay for it.

Frequently asked questions

What is CityMall and how does it work?

CityMall is a community group-buying e-commerce company for India’s smaller towns, run by CMunity Innovations Private Limited of Gurugram. Local agents called community leaders take grocery orders from neighbours over WhatsApp and the app, pool them, and distribute goods after a single next-day delivery from a nearby warehouse.

How much revenue and profit does CityMall make?

CityMall reported operating revenue of ₹534 crore and total income of ₹551 crore in FY25, with a net loss of ₹159 crore, according to RoC filings reported by Entrackr and Inc42. It has been loss-making, with losses holding near ₹159 crore across FY23 to FY25.

Who founded CityMall and who backs it?

It was founded in 2019 by Angad Kikla and Naisheel Verdhan (an early co-founder, Divij Goyal, left in 2019). Backers include Elevation Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, Accel, General Catalyst, Citius, Jungle Ventures and Waterbridge Ventures.

What is CityMall’s valuation?

CityMall was valued at about ₹2,780 crore, or $316–320 million, after its September 2025 Series D — a flat valuation versus its March 2022 Series C, per Entrackr and TechCrunch. It has raised roughly $159–165 million in total across seven rounds.

Where does CityMall operate?

As of 2025 CityMall operated in more than 60 cities across Delhi NCR, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Uttarakhand and Bihar, per TechCrunch, focusing on tier-2, 3 and 4 towns.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Entrackr — “CityMall reports Rs 534 Cr revenue in FY25” (FY25 RoC financials), September 2025
• Entrackr — “CityMall hits Rs 450 Cr GMV in FY24 with steady losses” (FY24 RoC financials), 2024
• Entrackr — “CityMall raises $47 Mn in Series D round at flat valuation” (valuation ₹2,780 crore), September 2025
• Entrackr — “CityMall raises $75 Mn in Series C round led by Norwest” (Series C, valuation), March 2022
• TechCrunch — “Indian grocery startup Citymall raises $47M to challenge ultra-fast delivery giants,” September 2025
• Inc42 — CityMall company and funding profile (total funding, FY25/FY24 total income), 2026
• Inc42 — “Norwest-backed social commerce startup CityMall fires 90 employees” (October 2023 and June 2022 layoffs), October 2023
• YourStory — “Ecommerce startup CityMall grabs $47M funding led by Accel,” September 2025
• Forbes India — “CityMall wants to change how small-town India buys groceries” (origin, seed/Series A, community-leader metrics), 2021
• General Catalyst — “Our Investment in CityMall” (model, thesis), June 2021
• Tracxn / The Company Check / Tofler — CMunity Innovations Private Limited legal-entity records (CIN, registered office), 2026
• Trading Economics — USD/INR reference rate, September 2026

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