Chefkart Raises $2 Mn Led by Blume Ventures and Pravega Ventures

L-R Aman Gupta, Vaibhav Gupta, Arpit Gupta

Upskills local cooks into trained & professional home chefs

15%MOM growth since it was founded in 2020

Serves 1400+ families and 2100+ cooking sessions daily

ChefKart, a Gurugram-based at-home cooking services platform, has raised $2 million in seed round of funding led by Pravega Ventures and Blume Ventures, with participation from Deepinder Goyal, Titan Capital, Kunal Shah, Tremis Capital, Lets Venture, and other prominent angels. ChefKart upskills local cooks into trained & professional home chefs who deliver world-class cooking services.

The capital raised will be utilized to further Chefkart’s vision to become the lead provider of subscription-based at-home cooking services in Gurugram and expansion to other geographical territories. The products and services offered aim to revolutionize the end-to-end kitchen needs of users. One of the immediate goals for the business is to improve the customer experience and increase tech adoption among service providers.

According to a FICCI – PwC report, the Indian Food Services market is valued at INR 5,52,000 crores in 2022, with the unorganised sector claiming over 57% of the market share. There is a huge demand for reliable cooking services. ChefKart aims to bridge this gap by transforming this untapped sector’s workers into reliable service providers.

ChefKart is transforming the hospitality industry by upskilling the unorganized home cooking spacer. The company has also built hyperlocal marketing and established supply control in Gurugram, with strategic plans for the upcoming expansion to other regions. ChefKart launched new lines of business i.e. Chefs for parties, and the team is also working on expanding through adjacencies available in the business.

ChefKart was founded in 2020 by Vaibhav Gupta, Aman Gupta and Arpit Gupta to solve the problem of the lack of reliable at-home cooking services.

Vaibhav Gupta, CEO & Founder, ChefKart, said, “We have served over 3200+ families and are managing over 2300+ cooking sessions daily with a 15% MOM growth. 3 co-founders being Guptas, cost-saving is our DNA. Urban Company shutting down their chef services again makes us the market leader and proves our mantle of running and building a large-scale enterprise.”

As organizations slowly realise that subscription-based services are the future, it makes it critical for the company to build a much-needed platform and thrive in this market. India’s at-home cooking industry is set for the next wave of growth with digitization. ChefKart targets an essential requirement of every household and aims to simplify at-home cooking services. The company forecasts aggregation on top of the grocery delivery space, with a goal to capture the time spent by consumers planning their daily meals and their arrangements.

Mukul Singhal, Co-Founder and Partner at Pravega Ventures said, “ChefKart is driven by the idea to digitise an essential service that is largely unorganised. They are the pioneers in streamlining an industry with tremendous untapped market potential in capturing customer food wallets. 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.”

“On the partner front, we are relentlessly working towards streamlining our home chefs' onboarding and state-of-the-art training process. This is just the beginning, and a majority of the people are realising that multi-cuisine delicacies can be made in the comfort of their home and according to their taste easily through our platform”, Arpit Gupta, COO, ChefKart, added.

Traditionally, customers tend to pay for food-related services after consumption, but the subscription-based concept is dramatically changing how this market works.

Document Scanning App Kaagaz Scanner Gets $575K in Funding from Pravega Ventures to Accelerate Growth

Kaagaz Scanner, an Indian document scanning and storage app, today announced today that it has raised USD 575,000 in funding led by Pravega Ventures alongside Axilor Ventures, Better Capital & a few prominent Angel Investors including Phanindra Sama (Founder of RedBus), Farooq Adam (Founder of Fynd) and others. 

Since its launch in June 2020, Kaagaz Scanner is today installed on over 1.9 million phones. Over 90k+ users use the app every day and more than 50 million pages have been scanned using Kaagaz so far. The company has earlier been also backed by First Cheque & Axilor Ventures in their pre-seed round of funding.

Kaagaz Scanner has also been acknowledged by the government of India as part of the Atma Nirbhar App Challenge where it was given a special mention in the office apps category. It has also been recognized by the HRD Ministry and & the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

Kaagaz Scanner was launched in Jun 2020 by a team of 3 seasoned entrepreneurs pursuing their 2nd startup together - Snehanshu Gandhi (IIT Bombay ’07, ISB Hyderabad ’12), Gaurav Shrishrimal (IIT Kanpur ’14) and Tamanjit Singh Bindra (AIT Pune ’06). 

Users are using Kaagaz Scanner for scanning different kinds of documents such as Notes & Assignments for students, Work or business related documents such as Invoices & Agreements & various personal documents such as id cards, insurance documents etc. The app which is privacy focussed works completely offline, doesn’t require a sign In, has zero ads and has unique features such as custom watermarking. The app is today available in eight Indian languages, differentiating it from all the other apps available on the Play Store.

The lead investor, Pravega Ventures said, “Today a smartphone is at the epicentre of most of our personal and business exchanges and we at Pravega are very excited to partner with the Kaagaz team as they build out powerful AI based utility products for the ‘Bharat’ users. The Kaagaz team aims to leverage their proprietary mobile based document scanner and create a repository of documents in their quest to become a key node in the exchange and storage of information for their users. Their AL and ML based approach is going to change how people have used utility apps till now.”

Kaagaz Scanner is the flagship product of the company and their immediate focus is on building it into a world class product. Commenting on the fund raise, Snehanshu Gandhi, Co Founder of Kagaaz said, “We plan to use this fresh round of funding to accelerate growth for Kaagaz Scanner and to increase our team size to speed up product development. Along with the app, we are also looking to build a suite of AI powered utility tools for our users that will help them manage their day-to-day tasks seamlessly.”

Vertices Partners acted as the legal counsel for Company and the Founders in this transaction.