Gurugram-based cooking service platform ChefKart has secured seed funding of $2 million (around Rs 15.6 crore) co-led by Blume Ventures and Pravega Ventures.
The round also saw participation from Deepinder Goyal (founder and chief executive officer at Zomato), Kunal Shah (founder of Cred), Titan Capital, Tremis Capital and LetsVenture, among other angel investors.
According to ChefKart’s founder and CEO Vaibhav Gupta, the startup is seeing a 15% month-on-month growth currently and plans to use the freshly-raised capital to expand geographical footprint in Gurugram.
ChefKart, founded in 2020 by Vaibhav, Aman and Arpit Gupta, upskills local cooks into trained and professional home chefs who deliver cooking services. The startup has built hyperlocal marketing and also set up a supply control in Gurugram. It also has plans to expand its new line of business, chefs for parties.
Bengaluru-based early-stage venture capital firm Blume Ventures was founded in 2010 by Karthik Reddy and Sanjay Nath. The firm has backed more than 100 startups including TaxiForSure (acquired by Ola) and ZipDial (bought by Twitter). Meanwhile, Pravega Ventures, founded in 2016, is a venture capital investment firm headquartered in New Delhi. The firm focuses on providing seed and pre-Series A funding to the technology-enabled businesses in India.
“ChefKart is driven by the idea to digitise an essential service that is largely unorganized. By also empowering the local community, they are on their way to developing a complete ground-to-customer supply-demand chain. It may be a challenging process, but the positive cash cycle model of ChefKart has significantly changed the way at-home cooking functions in India,” said Mukul Singhal, co-founder and partner at Pravega Ventures.
The cooking service segment in India has been witnessing a very slow funding from both early-stage and growth stage investors.
In December last, VCCircle reported that Grip Invest, a lease finance platform, had entered into a $2 million lease financing deal with cloud kitchen startup Big Spoon.
