HungerBox was founded by Uttam Kumar and Sandipan Mitra in 2016 and since then has been offering end-to-end F&B operations management with the help of technology. The start-up was initiated with a vision to revolutionize the concept of corporate cafeterias and food courts. The start-up aims to efficiently enhance the user experience and introduces more transparency in the F&B operations. They have been able to process over 50 million transactions, making it India’s largest B2B Food-Tech company.
They have more than 126 institutions in India across 14 Indian cities including Gurgaon, Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai, Bhuvneshwar, Goa, Coimbatore, and Guwahati, among others as its clients, along with 10 big companies in India, which account for a workforce of more than a lakh including Wipro, Accenture, HCL, Microsoft, ABB, Tata Motors, Lowe’s, Qualcomm and Capgemini. They have more than 500 digitalized cafeterias with more than 1,100 food vendors in their network. The start-up also recorded an annual food sale on the HungerBox platform which was in excess of $100 million.
The start-up allows live order tracking, feedback management, pre-ordering, digital payments, desk-based ordering, cafeteria density tracking, nutrition tracking, food ordering for meeting events and rooms and many more. HungerBox has a patent-pending for its exclusive Technology system and is an ISO 27001 specialized business. Currently, the start-up claims to finish nearly 5,60,000 transactions on its platform regularly. The number has been growing at 10% month to month across more than 535 cafeterias in which HungerBox operates for its potential clients across varied sectors.
Recently, the start-up has successfully closed a deal of $12 million investment from a group of Indian and International investors. New investors including digital payments major PayTm and NPTK participated along with existing investors like Neoplux and Sabre Partners in the funding round. According to reports, PayTm strategically invested $6.59 million in the funding with a digital payments major’s game plan in mind to introduce newer use cases to their payment business, while instantaneously digitizing offline dealings.
The start-up has earned backing by international investors like Sabre Capital and a host of HNIs which include industry players like K. Ganesh and Kris Gopalakrishnan (Founder of Infosys). It also has support from other industry players like Neoplux (South Korea) and Lion Rock (Singapore).
Last year, in July, the start-up raised $4.5 million in Series A funding round, which was led by Sabre Capital and Neoplux. Lion Rock and Kris Gopalakrishnan (Founder of Infosys) also participated and pitched in some funds for the start-up.
With the new investment, the start-up plans to develop its operations in 10 new Indian cities and fuel international expansion to Southeast Asia. With this expansion, the start-up missions to handle more than a million regular orders by the end of March 2020.
Contributing to the investment news, Madhur Deora, President, PayTm, mentioned that PayTm has been focusing on adding new use cases to the payments business and digitizing the offline transactions. He stated that HungerBox is a market leader in the institutional food tech area and Paytm aims to partner closely and strongly with them and offer the benefits of the PayTm ecosystem to HungerBox.
Sandipan Mitra, CEO, and Co-founder, HungerBox, mentioned on the start-up’s vision stating that their ambition is to transform into one of the biggest institutional food tech companies. To do this, the start-up has been deepening engagement with the corporate sector, expanding into the sectors with massive scope for improving the F&B management, such as healthcare, education, and retails, and also expand geographically beyond the Indian borders.
The start-up has been taking up operations with more than 1,500 staff across India and has successfully empanelled over 2,100 food partners serving different cuisines across the Indian cities in which it operates.
