Qans Consumer Products Pvt Ltd, which operates Generation Z-focussed snacks brand TagZ Foods, has raised an undisclosed sum in a seed funding round.
The round in the Bengaluru-based startup has been led by 9Unicorns, the venture fund set up by startup incubator and accelerator Venture Catalysts.
Other participants include Dailyhunt co-founder Umang Bedi, NetApp cloud business head Malhar Anaokar, VMWare senior director AL Jagannath, and Salesforce senior director Shesh Kondi.
TagZ Foods was set up last year by Anish Basu Roy and Sagar Bhalotia, both of whom previously worked at digital health and wellness platform Healthifyme.
The brand says its popped potato chips products are manufactured without any frying or baking processes, and that they have 50% less fat.
Currently, its products are available on online platforms including Amazon and BigBasket, as well as more than a 1,000 premium retail stores in Bengaluru and other cities. It will use the capital it has raised to improve distribution and capacity in other major locations in the country.
“There is, currently, a major tech-led transformation afoot in the Indian snack food industry. TagZ Foods is at the forefront of this disruption with its innovative manufacturing processes and specialised food-tech,” 9Unicorns co-founder and managing director Apoorva Ranjan Sharma said.
Venture Catalysts was set up in 2015 by Sharma, Anuj Golecha, Anil Jain, and Gaurav Jain. It invests between $250,000 and $1.5 million in early-stage startups and provides networking and mentoring to its portfolio companies.
At the start of September, it hit the first close of the 9Unicorns Accelerator Fund – which is its maiden investment vehicle – at Rs 100 crore (around $13.7 million).
Some of 9Unicorns' other bets include financial-technology firm Klub, deep-technology startup Deepsync, AI-based video meta-tagging platform Toch, education-technology startup Qin1, and fitness-focussed The Healthy Company.