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Delhi-based online specialty coffee retailer, Blue Tokai Coffee Roasters, has raised an undisclosed amount in its seed round funding led by Snow Leopard Ventures with participation from Bold Ventures.
Blue Tokai Coffee Roasters Brews was founded in 2012 by Matt Chitharanjan and Namrata Asthana. The company sources single-estate Arabica coffee beans from premium Indian coffee estates, roasts them on order, and sells them online direct to consumers and offline to leading cafes, restaurants and hotels across the country.
Blue Tokai recently set up a roastery and cafe in Delhi and the company aims to use these funds to add more roasteries in other major cities across India, starting with Mumbai in mid-2016. Besides, the capital will also be used to launch new products and build a robust & sustainable technological interface, in order to provide better customer experience.
Matt Chitharanjan, co-founder of Blue Tokai Coffee Roasters said, “The capital infusion comes at an exciting phase of our journey. We have already built a loyal and steadily growing clientele over the last few years and are now ready to expand the market and bring the specialty coffee experience to a whole new set of customers.”
The company has entered into direct sourcing agreements with coffee farmers in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. It is also the first Indian coffee retailer to introduce “profile roasting,” an advanced roasting technique that adjusts roasting temperature and duration according to the coffee bean’s profile in order to extract the best flavour from the bean. Coffee beans are roasted twice a week at their state-of-the-art roastery in Delhi and shipped to customers the very next day, to ensure freshness of coffee.
In August last year, Bangalore-based online on-demand coffee shop, DropKaffe, raised $300K in a funding round led by Manish Singhal and P39 Capital. Angels from the U.S., India and Singapore also participated in the round.
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