Bangalore-based food delivery start-up HungerBox, which caters to businesses, has raised $2.5 million in a pre-series A funding round led by LionRock Capital and Kris Gopalakrishnan, co-founder of Infosys, the company said in a statement on Monday.
HungerBox connects employees of its client organisations with food vendors using a mobile app. The app allows employees to view menu cards provided by enlisted food vendors, place orders and track delivery status.
In addition, the startup also provides software to organisations to track their food and beverages (F&B) operations including food consumption, orders and feedback.
“The funding we have received from marquee investors will boost our ability to scale our operations to keep pace with the traction we are seeing for our digital cafeteria management solution,” Sandipan Mitra, chief executive officer of HungerBox said in a statement.
Currently, HungerBox has more than 75 corporate clients like Qualcomm, Microsoft, FirstSource, Accenture, Capgemini, Genpact, ABB and McKinsey across cities like Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune, Delhi/NCR and Jaipur.
“HungerBox’s business has scaled tremendously over the last 15 months with nearly 7 million orders placed on our platform till date. We are clocking more than 120,000 daily orders and expect to scale this to half a million orders per day by end of 2018,” Mitra added.
HungerBox also claims to use an IoT internet of things-based solution to seamlessly connect vendor side hardware with employees of its corporate clients. Its app provides personalized recommendations to employees using Artificial Learning. The app also has the ability to undertake group-ordering and orders from restaurants in the locality.
According to the company, F&B spending in the B2B space alone is estimated to reach $14 billion in India in 2018, growing approximately at 15% per annum.
Online food delivery startup FoodPanda already operates a corporate service similar to HungerBox in India and other markets abroad. It had launched the delivery service back in October 2015.
In the consumer segment, cab aggregator Ola signalled its entry into food delivery space with the acquisition of Foodpanda India in December 2017. Ola’s competitor Uber has already been catching up in the food delivery segment with UberEats in India. While Indian delivery start-up Swiggy is reportedly by Bloomberg in talks with Naspers Ltd to raise $200 million.
Source: Mint