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It seems to be a tough year for the food tech startups in India. Now, Mumbai-based food ordering app TinyOwl has temporarily withdrawn its services in all cities except Mumbai, since yesterday.
Co-founded by five IITians, Harshvardhan Mandad, Gaurav Choudhary, Saurabh Goyal, Shikhar Paliwal, and Tanuj Khandelwal, TinyOwl, was operating in cities including Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Nagpur, Lucknow, Chandigarh, Bangalore, Pune & Chennai, and was planning to be present in 50 more cities by 2016.
An email sent to the company elicited no response.
The company has also shifted to a smaller office in Mumbai.
Earlier in November 2015, it was reported that Tinyowl had fired about 112 employees in cities like Chennai, Pune, Hyderabad and Delhi, as it decided to shut operations in these four cities. Prior to which, it had raised $7.6 Mn (INR 50 Cr) from Sequoia Capital and Matrix Partners. Tinyowl’s other funding round includes $16 Mn Series B funding in February 2015, $3 Mn and $1 Mn in Series A funding in December 2014 and August 2014, respectively. Also in September 2015, it had fired over 160 employees from Pune and Bangalore.
Besides, TinyOwl was reportedly in talks to merge with hyperlocal logistics platform Roadrunnr in order build a consumer-facing product called Runnr.
Apart from Tinyowl, many food tech startups have faced the heat of being sustainable in the market. Earlier in January this year, Zomato announced that it would shut down its online ordering service in Lucknow, Kochi, Indore and Coimbatore on account of a still nascent market in these cities. Bangalore-based Dazo decided to close, while internet-first kitchen Spoonjoy scaled down its operations in Bangalore and shut down in Delhi. On similar lines, Rocket Internet-backed Foodpanda has been in the news to reduce its workforce frequently in order to move towards profitability and sustainability.
The development was first reported by Medianama.
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