Voosh announces Pre-seed Funding led by Better Capital & launches India’s first Virtual Restaurant Chain powered by Decentralized Kitchen Partners
Bengaluru. Dec 21 2020: India's first kitchenless virtual restaurant brands company, Voosh, today announced it has raised a pre-seed round of funding led by Better Capital. The round also saw participation from some of the best foodtech founders and other execs who are backing the Voosh’s vision: Vivekananda Hallekere, Founder of Bounce, Hitesh Ahuja, Founder of Yumlane, Anuj Rathi, VP of Product at Swiggy, Ashish Chatterjee, VP-Product at Swiggy, Vivek Sekar, CBO at FreightTiger and Sundeep Teki, ex- AI & ML Head at Swiggy. This funding will be utilized to build the Voosh OS product that optimizes kitchen operations and to expand to 50+ kitchens.
Pioneering an asset light multi-cuisine restaurant chain, Voosh partners with existing independent restaurants as its cloud kitchens and delivers high quality food via Voosh OS, a technology-powered model that ensures compliance & operational effectiveness.
More than 90% of India’s food service market is unorganised which adds up to $80B - and is growing. However, a vast majority of independent restaurants have been able to grow or operate with good profitability due to lack of data-powered planning and execution. India stands at just 2M orders/pay which is far lower than most Asian countries like China which delivers 40M orders/day. This is largely due to lack of trust and quality & poor customer satisfaction. Voosh’s asset-light model solves these problems and brings a data-driven approach to everything from menus to pricing and to tracking customer satisfaction leading to increased orders for its restaurant partners and quality & affordability for customers.
Voosh partners and co-exists with local restaurant owners and turns an existing independent kitchen or restaurant into a standardized Voosh-branded restaurant serving high quality food with a focused and streamlined menu. With Voosh OS, it enforces a strict compliance and certification process for all its kitchens to ensure quality and hygiene. Voosh OS also ensures streamlined operations at every kitchen from order management to supply chain and pricing & discounts.
“At Voosh, our goal is to create India’s most trusted family of delivery-only brands by catering to the needs of customers by location while empowering our restaurant kitchen partners to improve their monthly earnings. We see a win-win for our customers as well as restaurant partners as we unlock demand and create personalized options by time of the day as well as by location”, said Priyam Saraswat, co-founder and CEO of Voosh.
Priyam Saraswat is an IIT Guwahati alumnus who led the launch of Oyo in China. He was previously the founder of a bike sharing startup Tazzobikes. Kshitiz Sanghi is an ISB
alumnus and was part of the growth team at Samsung. He also had a food startup during his undergrad which he had scaled to 10 cities in India.
With a Voosh-branded location nearby, customers get access to a consistent taste and experience as well as a wide range of cuisines as Voosh plans to create cuisine-focused locations and brands.
Voosh takes a share of the "increased profits" from restaurant partners along with an additional amount from value-added services that it brings while taking control on the quality, pricing and distribution.
“Delivery is solved. Food is not”, said Vaibhav Domkundwar of Better Capital which led the pre-seed round. “With a strong food delivery network in place, Voosh is innovating with a unique decentralized kitchen partner model to bring high quality and affordable food brands to customers while enabling independent restaurant owners with a profitable business model. We are excited to partner with Voosh from ground zero.”
Nextbite from Ordermark, which raised $120M from Softbank’s Vision Fund and FutureFoods from Travis Kalanic’s CloudKitchens has evolved towards the exact same strategy that Voosh is starting with, targeting India’s large and growing market.
Voosh is currently live at 8 locations in Bengaluru and is expanding its locations across the city every month.
