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The funding was led by Mistletoe, which is funded and owned by Taizo Son, a serial entrepreneur and youngest brother of SoftBank’s Chairman Masayoshi Son
The InnerChef’s team of Co-founders
InnerChef, a Big Data-based food discovery and delivery startup co-founded by GSF Accelerator‘s Rajesh Sawhney, has announced raising of US$2.5 million in a financing round led by Mistletoe Japan.
M&S Fund Singapore and other existing investors have also participated in this round.
Mistletoe is funded and owned by Taizo Son, a serial entrepreneur and youngest brother of Masayoshi Son, Chairman of SoftBank. Taizo is also the founder of Japan-based mobile gaming company GungHo, in which SoftBank had acquired a 51 per cent share for US$1.53 billion in 2013. GungHo bought back most of its shares from SoftBank earlier this year.
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This is Mistletoe’s first investment in India.
Sawhney said: “We plan to invest in building a high-growth foodtech platform and differentiate our experience even further. We have started adding more kitchens across our four metros of NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad. Our focus is to deepen our presence in these four metros for the next six months.”
Established in 2015 by Sawhney, Sanjeev Singhal and Bal DiGhent, InnerChef offers ready-to-eat meals, ready-to-cook meals and a wide choice of desserts. It is currently operational in seven Indian cities and ships over 100,000 meals per month. Desserts on InnerChef platform are provided by women food entrepreneurs, who are mainly neighbourhood chefs.
InnerChef plans to enable 10,000 women entrepreneurs on its platform in the coming five years.
In March 2016, InnerChef had acqui-hired two startups — Bangalore-based EatonGo and Gurgaon-based Flavour Labs.
Since its launch in 2013, Mistletoe has made over 10 investments globally. Its portfolio includes Garena, Southeast Asia’s largest unicorn with a valuation of US$3.75 billion, and Silicon Valley-based Zoox, a driverless car startup.
“Mistletoe explored investment opportunities of the corrective impacts on food and farming sector. We believe that InnerChef would become the crucial model of improving the food and farming ecosystem in India,” said Atisushi Tairo, Chief Growth Officer, Mistletoe.
Taira, who was previously the CEO at Bharti SoftBank, said it sees the chaos in various Indian sectors as an opportunity to leapfrog by leveraging the latest technologies of AI, robotics, IoT, and Internet.
“There is an attractive pool of talent that consist of ex-Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and smart young people graduating from top-notch universities. Huge opportunities plus upcoming technologies and infrastructure make India a big interest for us,” he said.
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