Chaayos plans pan-India move, raises $5 million to fuel expansion

In last two months, the funding scenario has made new inroads into the food business trends. With food tech start-ups and innovative food players gaining investors attention, food business has seen more than a two dozen food players raising funds and entering into a new era of development and expansion.

Chaayos, the Gurgaon based tea chain has raised $5 million from Tiger Global with participation from Ola Founders Bhavish Agarwal and Ankit Bhati.

Founded in November 2012 by IITians Nitin Saluja and Raghav Verma, this is the first round of institutional funding by the tea chain.

"Consumption of chai is ten times that of coffee in India and is growing at a fast clip. We aim to be India's biggest chai company and want to be present across formats and forms. We have designed innovative kettles that can deliver a litre of chai, keeping it hot for an hour and a half. Presently, we deliver chai and food across Gurgaon but are looking to strongly grow this segment,” shared Verama, Co-Founder, Chaayos.

With this investment, the tea chain is planning to expand its services to Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi-NCR with opening of more than 50 outlets.

“We will also use the freshly raised funds for pushing our delivery service through mobile app”, added Verma.

Besides pushing its chai-on-demand service, Chaayos will also focus on retailing its packaged tea blends, which it introduced a few months back, in partnership with Amazon, Big Basket, Grofers and the recently launched Ola Cafe.

Chaayos retails tea leaves, which it sources from tea estates to create its own blends.

Not only this, recently there are many other players in the same segment who are eyeing a big slice of the Indian ‘tea’ market including Tea Box backed by Accel Partners, JAFCO Asia, Dragoneer Investment Group and Chai Point funded by Saama Capital-funded.