Bangalore based Mukunda Foods Pvt. Ltd has received its angel round of funding from Indian Angel Network (IAN), a national network of angel investors investing in startups and early-stage ventures. The investment was led by IAN members Hari Balasubramaniam and P Gopinath who mentored the company post incubation.
The company was incubated by IAN in May 2012 when it got registered. However, the founders—Eshwar K Vikas, Sudarshan Lodha and Sudeep Sabat—were developing the product since early 2011.
Mukunda Foods is into the design and development of automated food equipment for use in the Indian food retail segment. Its key product DosaMatic is a tabletop machine that can make dosas. It has a company owned manufacturing plant and an R&D team of six people in Bangalore.
Eshwar K Vikas, co-founder of the company, said, “We will be using the funds raised to take this product pan India. We will also be building another product later, but as of now our focus is to concentrate on DosaMatic. The funds should be sufficient for 12 to 15 months and then we will be looking at a Series A funding round.â€
The company is present in Bangalore and is looking at expanding to other south Indian cities like Hyderabad and Coimbatore.
Vikas said currently the company has 100 confirmed orders for the product of which half are from quick service restaurants (QSRs) and the rest from hotels, offices and individual consumers.
IAN president Padmaja Ruparel said, “We see great potential in the company. It is very rare that an offline company gets an angel funding. IAN will be investing further in the company. It is a product catering to a high growth market.â€
IAN has over 225 members and has funded around 50 startups across sectors like IT, mobile, healthcare and education—both in India and abroad. In 2011, IAN invested over $8 million in 11 startups and last year, this amount increased to $11 million, invested in 17 companies.
Mukanda is IAN’s seventh investment to date this calendar year. Here’s a quick relook at its other recent investments.
July 2013: IAN invested an undisclosed amount in AM Edumedia Pvt Ltd, which runs IndiaCollegeSearch.com, an online search engine for Indian colleges and universities. The investment was led by IAN members Anupam Mittal, Vikram Upadhyaya and Varun Khurana and as part of the investment, Upadhyaya and Khurana joined the board of the startup.
July 2013: SnapLion Global Ltd, the company that owns and operates SnapLion.com, an online platform to create sleek, interactive mobile apps for anyone wishing to engage their fans in real time, received an undisclosed round of funding from India Internet Group, Blume Ventures and Rehan Yar Khan-led Orios Venture Partners. Silicon Valley-based investors including Vuclip CEO Nickhil Jakatdar and Piyush Shah, apart from Indian Angel Network members Rajan Anandan, Sandeep Soni and Gaurav Sharma, also participated in the round.
July 2013: Delhi-based social tech company Gram Vaani Community Media Pvt Ltd, whose social platform features voice and video-based local media offerings, raised $500,000 in its first equity investment round from IAN, along with a few unnamed investors.
March 2013: Invested an undisclosed amount in online education company Rank Junction Pvt Ltd which runs RankJunction.com, a ranking platform for competitive exams.
Feb 2013: Invested an undisclosed amount in Seattle-based Mobilewalla, a search portal for mobile apps, with IAN members Rajan Anandan, Venkat Raju and Sharad Sharma leading the investment round. As part of the investment, Raju joined the Mobilewalla board.
Feb 2013: XinLab Inc., which operates under the brand Vuclip, acquired Mumbai and Toronto-based mobile video streaming startup Jigsee in an all-stock deal while IAN and venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, who had invested in Jigsee two years ago, swapped stake to become shareholders of VC-backed Vuclip.
(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)
