Gurgaon-based Twigly, a kitchen-on-cloud-business, has raised $200K in its angel round. Amit Gupta, co-founder of InMobi, Sahil Barua, co-founder of Delhivery, Mukul Singhal of SAIF Partners, TracxnLabs, an incubator supported by Flipkart co-founders Sachin and Binny Bansal and Deepak Singh of Anzy Careers are among the list of angel investors.
The raised funds will help Twigly to expand its presence in Delhi in the next three months. It also plans to tie-up with third-party hyperlocal delivery companies such as Opinio in the future. However, it will continue to own a section of the delivery fleet to provide a better customer experience.
Founded in September 2015 by Sonal Minhas, Rohan Dayal and Naresh Kumar Kachhi, Twigly functions based on an online kitchen model. It aims to make organic food affordable and easily available. The food is prepared at a central kitchen and delivered to customers directly.
The company has a 600 sq. ft. kitchen in Gurgaon that can process around 120-150 orders on a daily basis. Currently, it’s operational in Gurgaon only with four delivery boys on the payroll. Addition of another kitchen is also on the cards, enabling Twigly to process 400 orders a day.
The food delivery sector in India is rising with burgeoning startups in the sector. It’s currently valued at $2Bn growing at 30-40% annually. However, there has been a couple of hiccups along the journey. The players in the sectors are grappling with concerns such as scaling, cash crunch and productivity issues.
Last month, Dazo, a Bangalore-based food tech startup had to shut its operations claiming that the business will move onto a new project. Recently, TinyOwl was in the news for firing over 180 employees from its Pune and Bangalore offices, citing cost cutting as the reason. Foodpanda also gathered a lot of attention after a Mint report stating that the company is struggling with suspicious orders, lack of automation and over-dependence on excel sheets. Another food-ordering app, Spoonjoy, was recently acquired by Grofers after it scaled down its operations.
Despite the struggles the food-tech market players are facing, Twigly team remains hopeful.
According to Sonal, what separates Twigly from its competitors is the fact that it maintains a high ticket size and the costs are managed well. He further added that the company makes profits on every transaction from the very beginning.
“Food as a category has margins anywhere from 50-60% and companies should not be losing money,” said Sonal.
Twigly is modelled on Sprig, a San-Francisco-based company which also focuses on providing affordable organic food. By delivering on-demand and quality fresh food, Twigly wishes to replicate Sprig’s success in India.
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