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Bangalore-based online gourmet food marketplace, PlaceofOrigin.in, has raised funding from Axilor Ventures, founded by S.D. Shibulal, Kris Gopalakrishnan, Srinath Batni, Professor Tarun Khanna and Ganapathy Venugopal.
Founded in 2014 by Pradeep Ponnadi, Sudarsan Metla Srihari and Ashish Nichani, PlaceofOrigin, is a curated marketplace that helps consumers discover and access specialty food products from across the country. The company gives foodies the opportunity to discover authentic sweets, snacks, staples and health foods.
The startup’s aim is to help traditional and new-age food producers acquire new and latent consumer markets in India to make their businesses more sustainable.
Currently, the platform hosts over 50 iconic brands and over 500 products from 25 unique cities and towns across India. It delivers to 20 states in the country covering all cities and many small towns.
The secured funds will be utilised to scale up PlaceofOrigin’s technology platform, operations and marketing infrastructure. “The investment will provide impetus to ramp up our vendor base and include on our menu the authentic native fares of all major regions,” said the founders of PlaceofOrigin.
The platform also helps traditional food producers, home producers, farms/ co-operatives market their products on a single digital platform outside their traditional marketplaces and create an online identity for themselves. Apart from this, it also helps these businesses with logistics support.
PlaceofOrigin.in was among the first batch of startups which participated in Axilor’s Accelerator Program that helps entrepreneurs in early stages of venture to successfully validate their concept and launch.
Operating in the similar space, just last month, Mumbai-based iChef.in, a gourmet meals startup, raised funding from Springboard Ventures. Another Mumbai-based startup, Naturally Yours, an online organic food marketplace raised seed funding from angel investor Sanjay Mehta; Bangalore-based ecommerce platform for branded food products and Delight Foods, raised about $600K (INR 4 Cr.) funding from an HNI family office represented by LN Sadani of Lensbridge Capital in Singapore.
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