Indian couple's roti maker gets USD 11.5 mn investment

An Indian-origin couple in Singapore has received a whopping USD 11.5 million as second round of investment for their innovative one-minute robotic chapati making machine, allowing them to expand the operations in international markets.
Pranoti Nagarkar, a mechanical engineer from the National University of Singapore, came up with a prototype for an automatic roti maker which won her the "Start-Up Singapore" competition in 2009.
Nagarkar and her husband Rishi Israni, who came on board as a co-founder a couple of years later, floated a product design company named Zimplistic to promote the roti maker brand called Rotimatic.
The duo co-founded start-up Zimplistic for the invention, a 17-kg breadmaker type device which combines 10 motors, 15 sensors and 300 parts to produce chapati.

Rishi, a serial entrepreneur and formerly the founder of a Singapore-based mobile security company, made the smart device and helped raise USD 3 million from private investors.
Zimplistic has now announced an investment of USD 11.5 million from NSI Ventures and Robert Bosch Venture Capital (RBVC), web portal TechinAsia.Com reported.

"It has been an amazing year for us and these new partnerships will only help to improve what we see as a revolutionary product that enables families to eat healthier," said Israni, CEO Zimplistic.
"With this funding, Zimplistic plans to finish the Rotimatic beta, accelerate manufacturing rollout and set up operations in international markets to fulfil the big demand," Israni said.

The new round of funding has been secured just few months after raising the first round of investment worth more than USD 1 million from Southeast Asia-based NSI Ventures.
Within a week of the launch of its beta version last year, USD 5 million worth of roti makers priced at USD 999 each were sold and Zimplistic had to close pre-orders.
Today, there's a waiting list for rotimakers amounting to over USD 72 million and over 5,000 requests for distribution partnerships around the world, the report said.