A lot of people go hungry in India every day. The ones we’re talking about are busy city slickers who neither find the time to cook nor have the stomach for restaurant lunch. It’s not as serious an issue as those who starve from poverty, but it’s still a problem that all these workers eat in such an unhealthy way. These are the sorts of folks TapCibo wants to feed.
This Bangalore-based startup is promising to deliver fresh, tasty, and affordable ‘cibo’ – which means ‘food’ in Italian – in three taps on your Android mobile screen. Currently, this new service is available only in Indiranagar, Domlur, and around the Old Airport Road in Bangalore. But the reception so far – 70 percent of its customers returning – makes its co-founder Shashaank Shekhar Singhal optimistic about launching TapCibo in more locations very soon.
Singhal was heading the mobile products team at bus ticketing company RedBus, which was acquired by Ibibo in 2013. While working for RedBus in Bangalore he experienced the pain-point TapCibo is now trying to solve. He and his wife, like most young working couples, rarely found time to cook. They employed domestic help, “but she would be on leave often, and we would end up eating out. That’s neither healthy nor tasty nor economical, but we didn’t have an option,” Singhal says.
The Indian School of Business (ISB) Hyderabad alumnus started thinking about a way to solve this problem.
Singhal founded TapCibo in November 2014 with technologist Monica Rastogi, who has over 10 years’ experience building technology products.
TapCibo revealed this week that it has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Alok Goel, CEO of one of India’s hottest startups, Freecharge. Goel was earlier COO at RedBus. Another connection is that he is married to Rastogi.
Chefs on the roll
TapCibo has a slightly different model from other Bangalore-based food delivery startups. “We have our own chefs and reliable partners who prepare fresh and healthy food every day. We have dishes like dal makhni (a curry made with lentils), palak paneer (spinach cooked with Indian cottage cheese), and kadhi (a soup of chickpea flour and sour yogurt with fritters and vegetables floating in it). Users of our app can check the menu every day on their mobile phones, pick what they like, and get it delivered. The whole process takes just three taps,” Singhal says.
Spoonjoy, iTiffin, and SnaxSmart deliver healthy food too, but they have a subscription-based model. On TapCibo, you pay for only what you order, and not a monthly subscription. “Think of us as a curated food demand platform,” Singhal says. The curation sets it apart from sites like Foodpanda that connect users to restaurants, where it can be hard to find options that are fresh, healthy, and affordable daily.
TapCibo decided to go mobile-only because both Singhal and Rastogi are experts with years of experience building mobile products. “And also because the number of mobile users in India grew over six times in the last five years. In the next two years, mobile internet users are expected to grow even more exponentially,” Singhal says. “Startups like Flipkart, Freecharge, and RedBus in other verticals are seeing that the growth is much higher on their mobile platforms. Also, mobile gives you a lot of advantages in terms of personalization,” he adds.
Hot food, hot space
The food business is a hot sector for startups in India currently. Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal recently invested in Spoonjoy. iTiffin, SnaxSmart, and TinyOwl also raised funding recently. Trailblazer restaurant finder Zomato from Delhi is on a global trek, announcing one acquisition after another in new markets.
“2014 saw a few services start breaking out in this area. I see a lot more money going here in 2015 – especially in food delivery-based businesses,” Sid Talwar, partner with Lightbox VC, wrote in Tech in Asia recently.
Food delivery-based startups are sprouting more in Bangalore than anywhere else in India for a reason. In the country’s busiest city Mumbai, there is a century-old food delivery system called dabbawalla. It’s a labor-intensive operation delivering close to 200,000 home-cooked meals to offices all over Mumbai. There is no technology play there, but the system works almost miraculously.
In two other metros, Chennai and Kolkata, office-goers can find affordable and palatable food in small, Indian-style eateries around the corner almost everywhere. That leaves Delhi, which is a mixed bag, and Bangalore, which has become this tech hub with a huge population of young, migrant professionals. Unlike in neighboring Chennai, a lot of simple South Indian eateries in Bangalore have given way in recent years to Western fast food joints and fancy restaurants, especially in the commercial and office spaces.
The entrepreneurship bug
TapCibo’s co-founders Singhal and Rastogi have both founded and run startups of their own. Singhal’s crowdsourcing platform for web design DesignChords, founded in 2009, had raised seed capital from angel investors in Palo Alto. He shut it down after two years when it failed to scale up enough. “Since then the entrepreneurship bug’s been in me. When I took charge of mobile for RedBus, its app had just 100,000 users. I brought it to 2 million in 18 months. It was the highest rated travel app in India,” he recounts. As for Rastogi, she founded Explore in Android in 2010, built 20 apps in the education category for toddlers, and ran the startup for over a year before shutting down. Now they’re applying what they learned from those experiences, especially in validating their new app.
In the 10 weeks since its launch, the TapCibo app has rung up 300 odd repeat customers, ordering food twice or thrice a week. They tend to open the app three to five times in a day. “We have been sort of on stealth mode so far, and haven’t done any marketing at all. The customers we got were just by word-of-mouth,” Singhal says.
Now positive feedback is encouraging them to come out. According to Singhal, “TapCibo is currently the highest rated food app on Google Play Store for India at 4.8 stars.”
Nevertheless, before geographically scaling to other locations, TapCibo wants to get higher momentum in the three areas of Bangalore it is operating right now. Hopefully, for hungry Bangaloreans in places like Jayamahal, where I work from, that will happen pretty soon.
See: 3 spaces to watch in India next year for emerging startups – food, fintech, and content
This post TapCibo emerges from stealth with funds to feed hungry Bangaloreans appeared first on Tech in Asia.
TapCibo emerges from stealth with funds to feed hungry Bangaloreans
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