Gurgaon based retail tech start-up NutriTap Technologies today announced that it has raised Rs. 10 Crores in a pre-series A round that saw participation from Venture Catalysts, LetsVenture, IK Capital, Elysian Fintech and a few marquee HNIs from the retail industry.
NutriTap Founded in 2018 by IIT Kharagpur alumni Rajesh Kumar and Priyank Tewari, creates alternate retail channels for brands to do Direct-to-Customer (D2C) Retail. The Startup’s full-stack retail expertise including smart kiosk technology and simplified distribution mechanism brings retail to the doorsteps of today’s customer through neighbourhood, 24X7, smart retail kiosks.
India has only a handful of players who possess the technology to create the right kind of unmanned retailing infrastructure which can address the real use case. The issue in this sector is that there is only a one-size-fits-all model with dependence on importing archaic and expensive vending machines from outside of India. NutriTap has addressed this issue through building in-house, patented, retail kiosk technology which includes Machine design, Payment hardware, backend software and Data & Business Insight capabilities. Combined with the Made in India tech, NutriTap’s omni-sector distribution network helps bring unmanned, 24X7 and customised retailing solutions to the door steps of the customers of today.
Commenting on the round, Rajesh Kumar, co-founder of NutriTap said, “In India, Kiosk based retail has started to be accepted as an alternate mode of retailing. To make sure that customers get the right retailing solution, you need to have the right technology to do that.
Rajesh also added, “At NutriTap, we are building the technology to address this alternate channel market which stands at $10 Billion and thankfully, are the only company in India to build a diverse range of solution to address this demand across the different sectors like Corporate, Hospitals, Factories, Residential apartments, Hostels, Co-working spaces etc. The capital raised in this round will help us to ramp up our in-house technology, invest in R&D and grow our presence across sectors and cities”
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NutriTap is currently operating 250+ smart retail kiosks locations across the tier 1 metro cities of India giving them a PAN India presence.
“While traditionally, alternate, kiosk based retail has been associated with vending machines and has been very limited to either Corporate snacking or Residential grocery categories, we believe that our technology has the potential to cater to the larger FMCG retail market and bring in a D2C flavour for brands across multiple categories. We have done several proof-of-concept projects in the last 2 years and have established a solid product-market fit through our customisable, multi-category retail tech. Through NutriTap’s retail kiosks, Brands stand to be nearest to their end customers and promote their products along with driving alternate channel retail sales.” co-founder Priyank Tewari said.
NutriTap aims to enable smart retail across 800 locations in the next 1 year and in more than 2,500 locations in the top metro cities of India in the next 2 years.
Ishank Kumar of IK Capital, one of the leading investors participating in this round said, “NutriTap was able to not just survive back to back COVID waves, but also posted solid growth numbers on the back of timely pivots. We trust the capability of the founders in building a full stack alternate retail company and executing the vision of making retail easier and accessible for customers and brands”.
Commenting on the fundraise, Sunitha Ramaswamy, President Early Stage LetsVenture Said “With the alternative retail segment being untapped currently, we see that NutriTap is in the right direction to create a very niche space for itself in this segment. With segment bound to grow in the next few months time, we at LetsVenture are happy to partner with Rajesh & Priyank’s team as they now look to scale their business to newer heights from here”
“We decided to back NutriTap’s growth story looking at the validation coming in from their customers, brand partners and investors. We believe that what NutriTap is building will propel them to become the category leaders in this still nascent space of unmanned, alternate retailing and we believe that they have the right team to make this happen.” said Dr. Apoorva Ranjan Sharma of Venture Catalysts, one of the world’s largest early stage fund.
