Bengaluru-based food tech company HungerBox said Tuesday it has raised USD 12 million in its Series C funding round from Paytm and other investors including Asian VC fund NPTK, India-focused private equity firm Sabre Partners, and Neoplux.
Most of the proceeds from this funding will go towards expanding into new geographies in the Southeast Asian market.
“With the sectoral and geographical expansion planned, I believe the team can achieve a doubling of volume in a short period of time. The market potential globally is very large and there are only a handful of companies with proven capabilities to service this large space,” Rajiv Maliwal, founder, Sabre Partners, said in a press statement.
HungerBox operates in the B2B space offering management solutions to companies, shopping complexes, and other institutions to run their cafeterias and food courts. Many enterprises, largely in the space of IT, retail, aviation, and technology, operate their own canteens for their employees. They dedicate a good chunk of their time to find the right food partner. HungerBox aims to solve this problem by acting as a marketplace and closely works with companies to help them find food caterers. It also focuses on maintaining food quality and ensures the timely distribution of meals to cafeterias.
Talking to local media Economic Times, HungerBox co-founder Sandipan Mitra said the company has partnered with over 100 companies and that it will leverage these relationships to enter new geographies in Southeast Asia.
“We plan to reach 1 million orders a day by the first half of 2020,” Mitra told ET, adding that the company has operationally broken even and overseas expansion would be a significant part of the strategy. The company claims it processes 500,000 orders a day.
A Techcrunch report quoted Mitra saying the company’s annual food sales have exceeded USD 100 million. In its next phase of growth, it also seeks to partner with schools and colleges to manage their cafeterias.
“HungerBox is the market leader in the institutional food tech space and we will partner closely with them and bring the benefits of Paytm’s ecosystem to HungerBox,” Madhur Deora, president of Paytm, said in a statement.
This is the first time Paytm has directly invested in a food tech company. Before this, it had partnered with Gurugram-based food delivery giant Zomato, allowing its users to find restaurants and order food directly from the Paytm app.
Catering to the needs of corporates to manage their food courts and cafeterias has lately become a promising space and food-delivery companies like Zomato and Swiggy have also tried their hands in this space. While Zomato acquired TongueStun Foods, an aggregator of food caterers and restaurants for offices in 2018, Swiggy started its own pilot project Swiggy Café in 2018 to provide catering solutions to enterprises, but it reportedly had to shut it down.