Food delivery isn’t dead folks — at least early stage investing in the domain isn’t. While larger food-tech startups are struggling to raise further capital, Twigly has managed to do so for its food ordering service. It has raised $600,000 from a group of angel investors.
Investors who participated in this round includes Bengaluru-based Tracxn Labs, Hyderabad Angels, Freecharge founder Kunal Shah and Flipkart vice-president Gaurav Bhalotia, among others. In November last year, Twigly raised $200,000 from angel investors, including Amit Gupta, Mukul Singhal, TracxnLabs, Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, and Deepak Singh.
The funding will be used to expand its kitchen-on-cloud business to Delhi and Bengaluru. It will also use money to expand into new cities and towards building a food brand that will be made available in supermarkets and online platforms.
Twigly, which was founded in August 2015, is said to be inspired by US-based Sprig. Its co-founders includes Sonal Minhas, Rohan Dayal and Naresh Kumar Kachhi. It works on an online kitchen model where the food is made at a central kitchen and shipped to customers directly. The menu is quite limited but it changes on a weekly basis. In India, HolaChef works on a similar model too.
The company is already running two kitchens in Gurgaon and delivers close to 150 orders a day. It is currently in the process of creating back-end infrastructure to manufacture its private label products.
Twigly is now targeting to serve about 1,000 orders a day in the next three quarters. The company’s foray into packaged food category is expected to further boost sales. As per Sonal, they are aiming to scale the business to $100 million in sales in the next seven to eight years.
The 50-member team startup claims to have a customer base of 6,000 people. Further it states that it witnesses a healthy repeat rate with customers ordering five to six times a month, on average.
Sonal Minhas, Twigly’s co-founder and ex-VP of SAIF Partners, said,
We are creating new categories rather than going after established food categories where both margins and pricing power are low. By controlling the entire food ordering experience and supply chain we have been able to differentiate ourselves and induce repeat purchases, which we believe is important for early success of any start-up.
