May 25, 2015

Venture Capital | 25 May 2015 Online Booking Platform EveningFlavors Secures Funding by Puja Chaurasiya   @Puja_C Bengaluru based EveningFlavors (owned and operated by Web Affinity Technologies Private Limited), an online table reservations startup has raised $500,000 (R3.18 Cr) fresh round of funding from independent angel investor Sandiep Shrivatsava. The newly acquired funds will be used to scale up operation and expand business across India. Previously in 2011, the firm had raised $35k from network of friends and family. With that investment, the firm expanded into cities, including Hyderabad, Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai and Pune. Launched in 2008 by IIT graduates Akash Shriastava and Abhishek Kumar alongwith Ravi Srivas of SJIT Bhilai and Vinod, an ex employee at Yahoo, Eveningflavors is an online booking portal that lets its user to discover great offers and discounts on buffet, dining, events and parties to make their evenings special from an extensive collection of restaurants and pubs. The startup, which present in 11 cities currently, claims to serve more than 300,000 diners annually and have 200,000 restaurants on board. The firm currently makes reservations for over 1,000 customers in a day across the existing cities, and plans to expand into Tier-2 cities like Indore, Goa and Surat in the upcoming phase. From bookings and reservations commission, the firm has clocked annual revenue of over R1.5 Cr. Recent deals in this space: Accel Partners and SAIF Partners had invested R12 Cr in Swiggy, a food ordering and delivery company based out of Bangalore. FoodPanda raised a fresh round of funding worth R688 Cr in round led by Rocket Internet AG and others. It also acquired the India operations of JustEat and Pune based, TastyKhana Bite Club raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Powai Lake Ventures along with the participation from Aneesh Reddy (Capillary Technologies), Ashish Kashyap (Goibibo Group) and Alok Mittal (Canaan Partners). Sequoia Capital and Nexus Venture Partners has invested R100 Cr in Mumbai based food ordering app, TinyOwl. SpoonJoy raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Sachin Bansal (Co-Founder Flipkart) and Mekin Maheshwari (CPO Flipkart), Abhishek Goyal (Founder, Tracxn) and Sahil Barua (Co-Founder, Delhivery).