And more money for grocery delivery folks. Town Essentials, a Bangalore-based startup which supplies groceries via an online platform, has nabbed $1 million in its angel funding round from a group of angel investors. The round was led by Sharad Hegde, along with the participation of Girish Reddy, Siddharth Patil and Shrikant Patil.
With this newly raised capital, the company is now planning to use the funds for marketing activities aimed at customer acquisition. Combining this funding round, the company has now raised close to Rs. 12 crore from angel investors.
Amar Murthy, founder and CEO of Town Essentials, said,
We will make our basket of private labels stronger by adding new products, improve back-end manufacturing and spend on advertising.
Founded in 2003 by Amar, Town Essentials is delivering groceries, just like multitude of similar startups out there. The startup’s goal is to help discover and share the best of what India’s farms and kitchens have to offer. Currently, the company has employed around 120 people and claims to be getting around 200 orders per day.
The company’s operation is quite simple. Users can go through company’s online catalogue and place their order online or by dialing company’s in-house call centre to place an order. Once the user places an order, the staff of Town Essentials handpicks the products from the market to deliver.
Town Essentials also launched a new platform called “Morning Drop” that will focus on subscription-based products such as milk, bread and eggs. Along with that, the company is also planning to ramp up customer base to about 10,000 and launch a mobile application for customers to order from.
As for similar startups to have raised funding, this space is filled up to the brim. The more recent ones though, to have raised significant amounts include Myonsto, Lookup, Jiffstore, etc. Startups like Big Basket and Grofers are among the bigger ones — not because of the order/day or operations though, but largely because of massive backing.
