Voosh Technologies Pvt Ltd, a foodtech firm, has raised an undisclosed sum as part of a pre-seed round of funding.
The round in the Bengaluru-based company has been led by early-stage venture firm Better Capital, with participation from several executives from food-technology and other sectors.
These include Yumlane founder Hitesh Ahuja; Swiggy executives Anuj Rathi, Ashish Chatterjee and Sundeep Teki; Bounce founder Vivekananda Hallekere, and FreightTiger chief business officer Vivek Sekar.
Voosh was set up earlier this year by Priyam Saraswat and Kshitiz Sanghi. The company says it operates an asset-light multi-cuisine restaurant chain, and partners with independent restaurants as cloud kitchen via its platform, Voosh OS.
The startup says its model solves operational and compliance problems by bringing a data-driven approach to aspects such as menus, pricing, and tracking customer satisfaction.
“With a strong food delivery network in place, Voosh is innovating with a unique decentralised kitchen partner model to bring high quality and affordable food brands to customers while enabling independent restaurant owners with a profitable business model,” Better Capital’s Vaibhav Domkundwar said.
Saraswat, an alumnus of IIT-Guwahati, has worked at firms including Oyo and previously set up Tazzobikes. Sanghi, meanwhile, is a graduate of the Indian School of Business and has worked with companies including Samsung.
Voosh says it will generate revenue by taking a share of the increased profits of a restaurant that it partners with, along with an additional amount from the value-added services that it will bring to the table.
Other companies using cloud kitchens as a differentiator have raised funding in recent months.
Last month, Kitchens Centre raised an undisclosed sum as part of its pre-Series A funding round from the United States-based early-stage venture firm Village Global. San Francisco-based Village Global says it is backed by technology billionaires Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, and Mark Zuckerberg.
In July, Mumbai-based Yumlane said it had raised $1 million in a funding round led by Singapore-based Jetty Ventures. Yumlane was set up as a packaged food startup in 2016, before pivoting to a cloud kitchen model last year.
