Qwikpik Technology, which owns and operates the Yumlane brand, has raised $1 million in a fresh round of financing from Singapore-based Jetty Ventures, the Mumbai-based company announced on Tuesday.
The four-year-old company, founded by former private equity executives Hitesh Ahuja, Rueben Ghosh and Rahul Kumar in 2016, also counts the likes of Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal, venture capital firm Orios Venture Partners, Singapore-based family office RB Investments and a host of high-net-worth individuals, as investors.
Yumlane, which originally was set up as a packaged consumer food brand, offering hot snacks and meals such as momo and pizzas across retail points, has now pivoted to a cloud kitchen business, according to a company-issued statement.
It currently operates an estimated 30 cloud kitchens across Bengaluru and Pune, the statement said.
“We are extremely pleased with Jetty Ventures endorsement of our cloud kitchen business and welcome them on-board. We believe cloud kitchen format will be the flag bearer of the food services industry in the coming years and expect more consumers to order online food delivery vis-à-vis eat-out,” Hitesh Ahuja, chief executive of Yumlane, said.
The company will use the proceeds from the pre-Series A funding round to expand to new cities and ramp up hiring, according to the prepared statement.
“Both global and Indian markets have shown a clear consumer preference towards order-in for non-occasional meals. The F&B industry has seen the QSR format carve a significant share in the eat-out food services space especially in the organised chain segment. Conditions are right for order-in preference to carve a large share in the overall market,” Chirag Meswani, managing partner at Jetty Ventures, said.
“Cloud kitchens will be a capital efficient format for this thesis to play out. Yumlane’s operations since its pivot to the cloud kitchen model in January 2019 has shown demand from the consumers,” he added.
Yumlane had raised $4 million in a round led by RB Investments in 2018, prior to which it had received $1 million from Binny Bansal, People Group Founder Anupam Mittal, Sachin Bhatia, cofounder of Nasdaq-listed travel portal MakeMyTrip, and Darius Pandole, managing director and CEO - private equity at JM Financial.