Vaibhav Karnavat

Dec 22, 2022

Daalchini, an IoT-enabled physical and digital vending machines startup, raised Rs 5 crore in the Pre-Series A round led by Artha Venture Fund (AVF). Some of the prominent angel investors in this round include Ajay Kaul, former CEO of Jubilant Foodworks, Ashutosh Valani, and Priyank Shah, co-founders of Beardo that was recently acquired by Marico, Vaibhav Karnavat, Amit Lakhotia, and others. Daalchini is a digital vending machine company that aggregates healthy, affordable, home-cooked meals through a network of smart vending machines deployed across Delhi, Chandigarh, Mumbai, and Pune. Daalchini is bridging the gap of supply and demand unaddressed by providing a variety of cooked meals for under ₹50 but 40 minutes faster than any food delivery app. Daalchini will utilise this fundraise to expand its footprint to cover all metros and to increase its product portfolio. “We will have 2,000 vending machines installed by the end of 2021, which is an 8x growth from where we are today. We are consistently expanding our product portfolio to cater to our large and diverse customer base,” says Prerna Kalra, co-founder of Daalchini. Daalchini is also very excited to have Mr. Ajay Kaul as the chief advisor, Kalra adds. At Jubilant FoodWorks, Kaul made sure India was the largest market for fast-food chain Domino’s Pizza outside the USA. Under Kaul’s leadership, the number of outlets increased from 90 to 1,100. Kaul is an alumnus of IIT-Delhi and XLRI Jamshedpur. He is currently a Senior Director at Everstone Capital. “In a post-COVID world, Daalchini’s value proposition increases manifold. They provide affordable cooked meals, from clean environments, delivered just once a day, inside your office premises, but one can eat it at a time convenient to them. Their solution is a no-brainer for the office owners and office-going employees,” says Anirudh A Damani, Managing Partner at Artha Venture Fund. “The robustness of Daalchini’s business model got further vindicated by the quality of angels that have joined us in this round, especially founders like Ajay Kaul, Ashutosh, and Priyank.”   A few key angels participating in this round are Renu Sati, Kumar Aditya &  Mayank Chawla from Paytm, Vivek Khare from LetsVenture, Rohan Sahu, Sriram Chittathoor, Charan Thota, Ravi and Prasad Padala, Anand Ladsariya, and Pradyumna Agrawal. Daalchini was co-founded by former Paytm employees Prerna Kalra and Vidya Bhushan in 2017. “We look forward to learning from Ajay Kaul and focus on increasing ‘same-store-growth,’ which might have been a challenge so far for vending machines that have a packaged supply chain,” says Vidya Bhushan. Daalchini had raised Rs 3.5 crore in Seed round from Artha Venture Fund, and a few angels like Amit Lakhotia, ex-Paytm, ex-Tokopedia, and Anand Ladsariya, MD, Everest Flavours. AVF thematically invests in B2B & B2C early-stage companies. AVF has invested in nine companies that include Agnikul, LenDenClub, Everest Fleet. The last investment was in Piggy Ride in July this year. Before AVF, General Partner Anirudh Damani has had eight years of experience investing in startups through his family office Artha India Ventures. Anirudh has built a portfolio of 75 companies that includes Interstellar, OYO, Tala, Purplle, CoutLoot, SuprDaily, Beardo, Rapido, etc.