Bengaluru, Oct 12 (IANS): Walmart and the Flipkart Group on Monday announced a fresh round of investment in Ninjacart, a Bengaluru-headquartered supply chain platform that sources fresh produce directly from farmers and quickly delivers them to retailers and businesses.

This follows the investment made by Walmart and the Flipkart Group in December 2019, as the companies continue to focus on ensuring access to high quality fresh produce for consumers and retailers.

This second round of funding comes at a time when Flipkart is focusing on growing its Supermart (grocery) and Flipkart Quick (hyperlocal business).

"The e-grocery market in India has seen tremendous growth over the past several months as people have increasingly taken to ordering groceries and fresh produce online," Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO, Flipkart Group, said in a statement.

"At the Flipkart Group, we are focused on ensuring that we continue to work towards developing new and innovative ways to meet our customers' needs in this space through the growth of Supermart and the recent launch of Flipkart Quick."

In the coming months, Ninjacart will use the capital to expand to new markets and build new offerings and supply chains for emerging customer segments, while continuing to innovate on the supply chain to make it more efficient, reliable, and profitable.

The transaction is expected to close by the end October, Walmart and the Flipkart Group said, without disclosing the financial details.

"The fresh set of investments from Walmart and the Flipkart Group takes us one step closer to our vision of making food safe and accessible for the billion people and changing the way food reaches our plate," said Thirukumaran Nagarajan, CEO & Co-founder of Ninjacart.

Launched in 2015, Ninjacart had earlier raised money from top funds such as Tiger Global, Accel, Tanglin, Steadview, Syngenta, Nandan Nilekani and Qualcomm, among other prominent investors.