Food start-up Petoo looks to raise $10 million in Series-A funding

The start-up founded by alumnus of IIT Kharagpur is looking to expand its quick service restaurant business in Chennai, Pune, NCR and Mumbai among other cities in the next one year

Petoo, a Bengaluru-based startup in the online restaurant space, is looking to raise up to $10 million in Series A funding to scale up its business. The startup, started by two graduates of IIT Kharagpur along with an alumni of Institute of Hotel Management (IHM), Bhubaneshwar, has plans to expand its operations across Bengaluru, Chennai, Pune, Hyderabad, NCR and Mumbai over the next two years.

"We started the venture with $500,000 raised from our friends and from our own money in January. Now, we are set to expand our services both in Bengaluru and other cities for which we are looking for funds," Ritesh Dwivedy, co-founder said.

 

Petoo is founded by three friends. Ritesh and Kumar Setu - each having over 8 years of experience in running businesses related to Food and E-commerce industry and Abhishek Mandal, chef by education and alumnus of IHM.

Petoo was started with one location (HSR Layout) in Bengaluru and in a month?s time expanded to eight locations. It has set up a centralised Kitchen, which acts as a hub and these 8 locations have distribution points. Food is produced centrally at kitchen, sent to distribution points and then order is dispatched from these distribution points to ensure delivery is done within 20 minutes.

"Going forward, we are aiming to cut this delivery time further by 30-40 per cent," Dwivedy said.

Currently, Petoo serves vegetarian & non-vegetarian options of Biryani, which are in regular demand. Petoo plans to expand its offerings as it adds more customers and reaches out to newer locations, he said.

Petoo currently gets around 100 orders a daily from restaurant aggregators like Foodpanda and JustEat among others. It plans to launch its own website and mobile app-based ordering system, which will provide a much greater ordering experience to users with features like 3-tap ordering, live order tracking on a map among others, very soon, Kumar Setu, co-founder of Petoo said.

"We will offer a cash-less food ordering solution for people staying late at office. Employees will be able to book food through our dedicated online system without any money transaction (based on predefined criteria of company's management)," Setu said.

Petoo plans to reach out to procurement managers, admins, project managers or CXOs in company. It is also working with taxi aggregators, bus operators to take orders for travelers on the move.

Currently, Petoo has employed 15 delivery boys and once it expands operations at Pune, Chennai, Delhi and Mumbai, it would employ around 800-1,000 delivery boys, Dwivedy added.