2008 was a pivotal year for Ahmedabad-based Rohan Desai. It was the year when Rohan completed his MBBS and became a doctor but also got through to IIM-Ahmedabad for a MBA.  Ever since this turn of events, a majority of conversations have revolved around why he decided to do an MBA after becoming a doctor? And my question wasn’t very different.

“My parents are doctors. I entered this field with the flow and never really questioned it, but I was always good with mathematics and analytical situations. I was always more involved with things and systems that worked at scale,” says Rohan. He easily got through CAT and made it to IIM-Ahmedbad, the most prestigious B-school in India. Here, Rohan was exposed to a lot of possibilities and his mind was set on building something for the healthcare sector and doctors at large.

After his MBA, Rohan took a consultancy job for a few years but by the end of 2013, he had made up his mind to start up. But what? Being a doctor with a knack for technology, he was observing how doctors used social media. “I’d often come across doctors posting some breakthroughs they made on Facebook which is not a place one would typically expect such updates,” says Rohan. This was one angle but there was something more basic which was broken – doctors work on  different models (contract based, part time, internships, exclusive contract, etc.) with hospitals and clinics, and there is no consolidated place for these openings.

Thus the idea to open a job portal for doctors was born. There are various specialities and super specialities for doctors. With a very wide category spectrum, a dedicated platform for doctors does make sense. And on top of it, they have the social layer with speciality specific feeds so that it is relevant to every doctor on the platform.


(L to R) Rohan Desai, Binal Doshi, and Kinnar Shah
Keen to explore this idea, Rohan got in touch with Binal Doshi, a doctor friend who also went for MBA to IIM-Kozhikode. She liked the idea.

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When Tapan Kumar Das came to Bangalore, he observed that people were not eating healthy. That was when the idea to spread awareness regarding the long-term benefits of healthy food struck him.

Tapan launched iTiffin in 2013. It’s an online-cum-offline tiffin service company that offers high quality healthy and delicious meal plans for homes and offices. With a seamless blend of advanced nutrition, food science and food service, it offers wellness meals and calorie-defined meals that are in accordance with the customer’s preferences.


The company assures qualitative and wholesome food to its patrons. “The idea behind launching iTiffin was to provide people with nutritious meals at their doorstep and make them aware of how lifestyle disorders can be prevented through good food,” says Tapan.

Early days of iTiffin

Although getting early customers and raising initial funding was difficult, in spite of these hassles, iTiffin delivered over one lakh meals in the first year of operation.

“Initially, it was a cumbersome task to maintain the quality of food as well as retain potential customers, but as time passed and people started realising the importance of healthy eating in the country, it became easy for us to deliver high-quality meals to our patrons. Since our inception, we have been bringing innovation and variety in the menu to avoid monotony and lure customers to opt for healthy meals,” points out Tapan.

Growth of business

The Bangalore-based company has grown remarkably during last year attaining the delivery milestone of over one lakh meals in the first year of its operation itself. “With over 5000 loyal customers in our kitty and an average customer retention period of 60 days, we were able to clock revenue of around Rs. 3 crore in the fiscal year 2014. Our USP of providing scientifically-designed nutritious meals for our patrons is the reason behind the immense success of iTiffin,” adds Tapan.

The company is looking forward to expand its orbit to each and every city across India. “We are also extending our product line by launching innovative meal plans that suit the requirement of our patrons,” adds Tapan. iTiffin is looking to raise $10 million to increase its product portfolio and propel its pan India reach.

Why healthy food segment is hot for startups?


The health food domain of the country has been growing at a phenomenal rate since the past few years, owing to the increased level of awareness among people regarding the benefits of a nutritious and balanced diet. The market is new and lucrative as not many players have entered the landscape yet. Over the past one year we have been witnessing a slew of startups making debut in the healthy food segment.
The brainchild of IIT Delhi alumnus FRSH offers healthy food like salads, juices and wholesome cereals among others. , Spoonjoy, offers freshly cut fruits, sprouts, a combination of both, lunch, snacks on a weekly subscription basis. Another New Delhi-based startup Fresh Food ventured into nutrition food market with its flagship product Juice Up which offers a range of 100 percent raw and fresh cold pressed juices.

“Whether in the online or offline space, the health food segment is going to see a positive growth graph. As people grow more conscious about their health and develop an understanding about the importance of having a healthy lifestyle, food companies are going to see enormous growth,” says Tapan.

With the increasing trend of nuclear families, hectic schedules of the working population and the escalating demand for wholesome food at one’s doorstep, the future of the health food segment is promising in the country.

The segment of health and wellness food is estimated to rise to a whopping Rs. 55,000 crore this fiscal year. Due to the increased prevalence of lifestyle diseases in the country, people have now become more aware of the causes of these diseases. This has hence increased the market size of the health food sector, providing umpteen opportunities for food companies to launch healthy and nutritious packaged foods in the country. The fast-paced and hectic life of people has broadened the health-food market enormously.

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My mother taught me how to make tea when I was very young. And ever since, I have always been particular about my cup of chai,” says Nitin Saluja, Founder of Chaayos, an NCR based chain of tea outlets. Their tagline reads ‘Experimenting with chai’ and it reflects when you look at their menu where you’ll find teas like ‘aam papad chai’ or the rose cardamom chai. Launched in November 2012, Chaayos currently has eight outlets in NCR and is now planning to expand to Mumbai and Bangalore.

The back story

Chai was always a crucial part of Nitin’s life but he had never thought of opening a chai outlet, especially not after getting through IIT-Bombay! But life always has interesting cards to deal out; one only needs to be open to possibilities.

In the final years of college back in 2006, Nitin was pretty sure that he didn’t want to get into a dull job routine. He got along with a few friends and started a robotics company, Think Labs. Incubated at SINE-IIT Bombay, the company has morphed into a dedicated provider of hands-on science and technology education in India and is currently valued at over $10 million. Moving on from the operations at Think Labs, Nitin moved to Opera Solutions for a five-year stint before the entrepreneurial bug bit again.

“Somehow chai was always there at the back of my mind. And when I asked myself if there is a place in India where I can find ‘meri wali chai’, the answer was no,” says Nitin. This is when he decided to go ahead with this seemingly crazy idea of starting an outlet of chai. The idea was to have something like a Starbucks for India and that of course has to deal with ‘chai’.


Starting up

While thinking of this, Nitin was introduced to Raghav Verma, an IIT Delhi graduate of batch 2010 by a common friend and the two hit it off straight away. Nitin took care of the product development, settling the supply chain, setting up processes while Raghav took care of marketing and business development.


Founders- Nitin Saluja and Raghav Verma
Settling for the name Chaayos, the duo opened their first outlet, got the unit economics right and charted a scaling up plan. Over the last two and a half years, they have opened seven more outlets with a core team of eight people and a staff of 50 as the ground staff.

“The challenge which most people face is to maintain quality while scaling up. This is one area which we think we’ve got covered and gives us an edge. Each of our cups can give that ‘meri wali chai’ feeling,” says Nitin. Their highest grossing outlet turned in an annual revenue of INR 1 crore. The target market for Chaayos is the upcoming middle class that has money but is equally conscious of the value they get.

Interiors at Chaayos

Making chai a venture backed business

Great. All this sounds good but Chaayos has also been able to raise an angel round from the likes of Zishaan Hayath. How is chai a venture-backed business? Don’t investors look for a 100x return? Nitin gives us Zishaan’s perspective to this:

Is the market there? Well, chai is a product that doesn’t need any marketing.
And if one outlet is doing INR 1 crore annually, it is pretty easy to scale up to INR 100 crores in total in the next two years (Math – 60 Stores X 1.5Cr per store = 90Cr ~ 100 Cr)
And chai is not restricted to India alone; Chaayos will be keeping an eye out for SE Asia, the Middle East and other regions as well.
The plan for Chaayos is to setup 60 more outlets in 2015 and scale up rapidly. Apart from outlets, they already have tie ups with corporate for deliveries. Their app is coming out soon which will be opening a B2C subscription channel as well.

Is Chaayos alone in the race? Ofcourse not. Chai Point is perhaps the largest player in the area which already has 60+ stores. There are many other chains as well like Infinitea, Chai Thela, Chaipatty, etc. but most of them haven’t been able to scale up quickly enough (and everyone doesn’t have to). Nitin and team are currently focusing on getting the deliveries kick off with their app launch along with a fund raising effort to fuel growth.

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When the first season of ‘Satyamev Jayate’ was launched, it had the country talking about unspoken issues faced by people around us. Be it casteism, healthcare, Khap Panchayat or the stigma of bearing a girl child, every issue was raised.

Madhu Gupta was one of millions who watched Satyamave Jayate and was shocked to find out how almost no doctor prescribes cheaper generic medicines. The cost of these medicines is close to 40-to-60 per cent of branded medicines. They also have the same compositions and effects as their branded counterparts.


Madhu decided to take responsibility to change things. She started discussing the prospects of starting up to provide generic medicine to people. Madhu teamed up with her husband Pankaj, and both of them started MereMedicare.com- an e-commerce portal for generic medicines.

Prior to starting MereMedicare, Madhu was an associate consultant at Oracle India Pvt Ltd for two years, while Pankaj worked with Veeco instruments in various capacities. Both are based out of the US, but the fact that they were away from India did not deter them to startup.

At present, they have close to 5000 registered patients and more than 250 pharmacies in their network. After deliberating and researching various aspects of running an e-commerce business in the pharmaceutical industry, Madhu and Pankaj finally started up in July 2014. For every medicine, customers can buy either branded or generic versions. While branded medicines cost more, generic medicines are cheap in comparison with the same benefits. The company has its presence in Delhi, Noida, Gurgaon and Bangalore.

Talking about funds, Pankaj says, “So far, we’ve been bootstrapping to run and expand our business. We believe that personal funds will be sufficient to expand Mera Medicare in at least 10 cities. For expanding more and adding more business segments, we`ll definitely need funds. In the last six months, we’ve received offers from three good investors, but we politely declined them. We plan to re-engage with them at the right time.”

The company works as a marketplace connecting buyers and sellers in the healthcare industry. The founders are based out of the US, while the team is set up in India. At present, the team coordinates through Skype. MeraMedicare has four full-time members on board and a team of over forty interns working from different locations. The company works on a subscription model for regular patients and healthcare professionals, while others can purchase medicines online -just like any e-commerce site- with a delivery time of around 2-4 hours.

Talking about their future plans Pankaj says, “Overall, we want to be the Flipkart of healthcare sector. We would like to expand in 25 major cities of India in the next two years. We plan to be operational in six more cities in India, which are tentatively Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune, Surat, Chennai and Jaipur. “

While e-commerce is on the rise, healthcare commerce still has a long way to go, and the market is ripe for more players. At present, we have companies like HealthKart, Medidart and Medist working on this front, too. But considering the population and the market, we still have a lot of opportunities in this sector.

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Bengaluru-based Qyk, a mobile marketplace for finding local services, has raised angel funding from a group of angel investors, including early investors of Ola, Housing and Delhivery.
 Deepak Singhal, Co-founder & CEO of Qyk, said, “Hiring a local service provider in India is a big challenge and we feel the timing is perfect to build a mobile-first solution given the rapidly increasing smartphone penetration.”

Keeping up with uberification of services’ trend, Qyk seeks to serve as a one-stop platform for availing a range of local services from local service providers in the vicinity. The mobile marketplace connects service seekers with service providers. They are doing what JustDial has been doing for the web and call centre for a mobile and messaging era.Qyk founding team - Deepak Singhal, Sangharsh Boudhh, Shobhit Singhal and Anubhav Sahoo

The founding team comprises folks with relevant experience in building scalable Internet and mobile products. Qyk was founded four months ago with a vision to build a hyper local solution for customers. Founders are alumnus of IIT Bombay and IIT Kharagpur -- Deepak Singhal, Sangharsh Boudhh, Shobhit Singhal and Anubhav Sahoo -- who come with past experience of working with companies like Ola, InMobi, Practo and Deutsche Bank.

How does Qyk work?


The app asks users to specify his/her service requirements and it pushes aggregates competitive quotes from the most relevant service providers. It makes it easy to compare and save time and money.

Qyk is a mobile platform that enables customers to hire trustworthy service providers and professionals near their area. This includes service providers other than ‘home services’. Finding a reliable and competent local service provider specific to one’s requirements is difficult and time consuming. Qyk offers the customer, options tailored to his personalized needs by enabling comparisons and competitive quotes. This enables them to make a well informed choice.

Regarding the future potential of Qyk, “Local services solutions market is ready to be disrupted and this is a team which has the vision and skill-set to do it. We need a mobile solution like Qyk to help businesses grow and enable customers to find the right service providers,” says Zishaan Hayath, who is early investor in Housing and Ola.

Angel investors

Investors include Zishaan Hayath (Co-founder of Toppr and Powai Lake Ventures), Abhishek Goyal (CEO and Co-founder of Tracxn.com, ex-Accel Partners) and Sahil Barua (CEO and Co-founder of Delhivery).

Abhishek Goyal, early investor in Delhivery, says “Qyk is a great idea that helps us find local services that are more professional in nature. There are two large plays in local services, one is on-demand and the other is reverse auction. Reverse-auction business model is largely a technology play. Team Qyk’s approach of solving this problem via a mobile first product and their extensive experience in technology gives them a very big advantage to be the market leader."

Now in Bangladesh, Our peon is providing this type of services. They do not develope any app for this service. But on demand of the customer they are dedicated for those services booked over the mobile. Our peon will develope the app so that they can provide services on technology based.

The smell of freshly peeled garlic and onions wafted out of the room. Piles of peels were kept at the corner and I could see huge containers storing garlic and onions all around. This was not a cooking facility. I had just walked into a pioneering cut and peel unit with a cutting edge machine that peeled garlic at the rate of 100kg per hour. Highly trained manual labour can only accomplish one tenth of that rate.

The Bangalore-based Edanta Food, all set to clock an annual turnover of Rs 1.3 cr this financial year, aims to completely change the highly unorganized cut and peel industry in India through a combination of technological innovation and professionalism. At present, the enterprise produces peeled garlic, onions and grated coconut through its brand Cookup and supplies the same to most of the well-known supermarkets and hotel chains across Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Cochin and Coimbatore. Edanta’s customers include famous retailers and hoteliers such as Reliance Fresh, Nilgiris, FoodWorld, Big Basket, Naamdhari’s, Auchan, Star Bazaar, More Megastore, Taj Group, Adyar Ananda Bhavan, Sodexo and Thalappakatti. Demand is escalating at an exponential pace – Edanta has expanded from 10 to 170 outlets last year with sales having increased nearly seven times since January 2014.

Prajwal Koteshwar (L) and Vinayak Nanjundappa (R)

While completing his masters in computer science in the US, Vinayak Nanjundappa noticed the huge stock of freshly cut vegetables that was available to the residents. Automating the most laborious step in the cooking process had significantly reduced the workload on most home cooks and professional chefs and increased efficiency. Wondering why something similar had not been done in India, Vinayak shifted back home to research it. He completed stints at Wipro, GE and Ethnus where he met Prajwal Koteshwar, also a computer engineer, who had previously worked at an entrepreneur mentoring enterprise. Hungry to begin selling their own products, both decided to start their own venture in 2013.

Mechanizing the Indian kitchen


Large scale urban socioeconomic trends were already picking up – the number of working women was increasing steadily, people were spending more time commuting to work since offices were shifting towards the outskirts of cities leaving less time for household chores. However, nothing had changed in the kitchen.
While experimenting, Edanta’s founders realized that dealing with cut vegetables was extremely complicated, although their products could last for seven days, due to poor retail infrastructure, no store could provide chillers that could maintain temperatures less than 5  degree C to keep the vegetables fresh. The product’s lifecycle was reduced to two days and Edanta tasted its first failure.

Instead of reinvesting in more technology to support the retail infrastructure, the ‘engineering’ duo customized imported machines by themselves to peel and sort Indian vegetables and focused on products such as garlic that last for seven days despite being stored at temperatures close to 12 degree C. After a few trial production runs, they never looked back. Edanta now accounts for 70 per cent of the cut and peel products in the retail market and caters to 30 per cent of the hotels in Bangalore. The city’s total consumption is almost 1,000 kg a day and it has the potential to consume three times its current quantity.

The X factor

The conventional way of sourcing for peeled garlic is through contractors who have hired labour to manually peel garlic at a certain rate. There is absolutely no guarantee regarding the quality or reliability of the product. Add to that, the increased dependability on labour and it means that supply is affected by holidays, sickness and leaves of absence.

By complying with food safety standards set by FSSAI and using R&D from CFTRI, IIHR, Edanta certifies the hygiene and safety of its products, an aspect that cannot be replicated by the unorganized segment of the cut and peel industry. Customers pay a certain 20-25 per cent premium solely for the accountability, due diligence and level of professionalism the venture has brought to the sector. Every order is accounted for in their system and the pricing is transparent.

Edanta follows a two-pronged approach to revenue generation, of targeting the consumer segment (low volume higher margins) and HORECA (high volumes lower margin) industry with annual contracts due to which it enjoys a stable and robust revenue model. Annual contracts offset the risks of capital expenditure going into innovation and continuous R&D.

The road ahead

The Edanta team is an ambitious one. Its vision is to join the league of legendary consumer product companies such as HUL and P&G by organizing an industry dominated by manual labour and bringing in a certain rigour to the sector with high-quality, safe and fresh products for consumers. They have plans of expanding into other major cities including Mumbai and have already started receiving enquiries from Delhi, Gurgaon and Pune. A much larger, 6,000 sq ft factory is in the works in Tumkur which can produce eight tonnes of the product per day. Soon, once economies of scale set in because of the increased volumes, the current premiums can be reduced from 20 per cent to five to eight per cent.

Vinayak comments that the growth in technology has helped him cut costs over the last few years with the image processing technology in his machine now costing only Rs 24,000 per unit from Rs 1.5 lakh a few years ago. He believes the use of manual labour will decrease with individuals from all strata aspiring for higher quality of life and skilled jobs. The metamorphosis of the milk market has inspired him. The entry of organizations such as Amul, Mother Dairy and Nandini has brought in high standards in packaging, safety, pricing and hygiene of milk products. Buying milk in tin cans is no longer acceptable to us. Vinayak hopes that Edanta can start a similar revolution in the cut and peel industry.

It seems that the day is not far off when Indian kitchens too can move to the age of complete automation.

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