Twigly raises $600K in seed funding

Aiming to establish two new kitchens in Delhi and Bangalore over the course of next 6-10 months, food tech startup Twigly has raised $600K seed funding from Tracxn Labs, Hyderabad Angels, Freecharge founder Kunal Shah and Flipkart vice-president of engineering, Gaurav Bhalotia and other angels among other.

Twigly works on an online kitchen model, where the food is made at a central kitchen and shipped to customers directly. The menu is limited and changes on a weekly basis. It is operational in the Delhi-NCR and clocks close to 150 orders per day.

Rohan Dayal, the co-founder of Twigly, said, “We’re building an iconic brand that people love associating themselves with. We’ve already gotten requests to open across India (Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad) as the word spreads, and we’re working day-and-night to grow Twigly without compromising on our core values of quality and customer-focus.”

Founded by Sonal Minhas, Rohan Dayal and Naresh Kumar Kachhi, Gurgaon-based Twigly went live seven months ago and has a customer base of 6,000 people. It witnesses a healthy repeat rate with customers ordering five to six times a month, on average. It currently has a 50-member team.

Minhas stated, for a kitchen to break even Twigly requires 80 orders a day. “We continue to do all this in a profitable manner. We are profitable at the unit level and at store (kitchen) level,” said Manhas.

In November, Twigly raised $200,000 from angel investors, including Amit Gupta, co-founder of InMobi, Mukul Singhal of SAIF Partners, TracxnLabs, an incubator backed by Flipkart co-founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, and Deepak Singh of Anzy Careers.

Twigly is aiming to scale to $100 Million in sales in the next 7-8 years. For its customers, Twigly is creating personalised user experiences based on its customers eating habits and choices. Examples include ‘Slick’ – Single click ordering of Twigly’s sandwich of the day, and one-click online payment through Twigly’s apps, available for iOS and Android devices.