Kaivalya Foods and Beverages India Pvt Ltd, which operates retail aggregator F5, said on Wednesday it has raised seed funding from startup incubator and accelerator Venture Catalysts.
The New Delhi-based company didn’t disclose the quantum of investment secured from Venture Catalysts.
The infusion comes after F5 in March raised an undisclosed amount from LetsVenture, Madhusudan Kela-backed Singularity, Artworks founder Mohit Satyanand, Tres Ventures, Startup Buddy and the founders of Country Delight.
F5 was founded in 2018 by Raghav Arora and Lalit Kumar Aggarwal, alumni of the Indian Institute of Management-Lucknow. The company says its supply chain and retail aggregation platform cater to the workplace retail segment.
The company said in a statement it will use the capital it has raised to expand the scope of its offerings as well as provide value-added propositions such as delivery, micro-ATMs and mobile recharges, among others.
“For customers, we are a brand for their workplace needs that is fresher and more authentic. For our vendors, we have become their access point for multiple partnerships that can boost their business and revenues,” Arora said.
Venture Catalysts co-founder Apoorv Ranjan Sharma said the incubator-cum-accelerator was confident of its investment in F5 because of its focus on vendors and small and medium enterprises.
The startup claims that it has over 4,000 paying consumers across Delhi and Lucknow, and that it has partnerships with more than 20 vendors in the National Capital Region alone.
Venture Catalysts
The startup accelerator was set up in 2015 by Sharma, Anuj Golecha, Anil Jain and Gaurav Jain.
Its investment spree in early-stage firms has continued unabated despite the nationwide lockdown in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Venture Catalysts has made at least 11 investments this year, including in F5.
Its other bets have been on blue-collar focussed recruitment platform MyKaam, dietary supplement brand Power Gummies, insure-tech startup Insurance Samadhan, prayer materials startup OM Bhakti, artificial intelligence-enabled helmet maker Altor, enterprise-focused neo-banking platform Nupay, financial-technology startup GetVantage, corporate venturing platform IncubateHub and solar panel cleaner startup Skilancer.
In August last year, Venture Catalysts floated a fund, the 9Unicorns Fund, with a corpus of Rs 300 crore ($43.44 million), to help early-stage Indian startups expand their business.