Online food ordering startup Bite Club raises $500K from Powai Lake Ventures & others

Gurgaon-based Ecstasy E-Ordering Pvt Ltd, which owns and operates food ordering site Bite Club, has raised $500,000 (Rs 3.1 crore) in seed funding from Powai Lake Ventures and a few angels including Aneesh Reddy, co-founder & CEO at Capillary Technologies; Goibibo Group founder Ashish Kashyap; and Alok Mittal, who has been heading Canaan Partners India (VC firm now evaluating future investment strategy in India).

The funding will be used to enhance technology and for expansion.

"Currently we are present in Gurgaon. In a few months we plan to expand to Delhi and Noida," Prateek Agarwal, founder, Bite Club, told Techcircle.in.

The company was founded in November 2014 by Agarwal, Aushim Krishan and Siddharth Sharma. While Agarwal and Krishan are IIT Kharagpur alumni, Sharma completed his higher studies from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

The startup acts as a managed marketplace for food delivery. It has on board 80-100 individuals, including housewives, recipe bloggers, restaurant chefs and former restaurant owners, etc who cook the food, while Bite Club gets it delivered to end customers.

It is working on a revenue sharing basis, and claims to be processing 250-300 orders per day with an average ticket size of Rs 180. The company further claims to have served over 6,000 meals to more than 1,500 customers so far.

Customers can place orders via call, WhatsApp, as well as through the company's Android app or Facebook page.

Powai Lake Ventures is a Mumbai-based angel syndicate led by Zishaan Hayath who is an entrepreneur himself. Hayath is building Toppr.com, an online prep platform for entrance exams in India which is backed by SAIF Partners and Helion Ventures. Previously, he also invested in Ola Cabs. The syndicate, on the other hand, has invested in companies such as Housing.com and Adpushups among half a dozen other startups.

Over the past few months, the online food ordering space has been attracting a lot of investor interest. Last month, Gurgaon-based Yumist Foodtech Pvt Ltd, which runs online food ordering startup Yumist, raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from Orios Venture Partners.

In January this year, TapCibo, an Android-based mobile-only food ordering service owned and operated by Bangalore-based TapCibo Online Solutions Pvt Ltd, had raised an undisclosed amount in funding from Alok Goel, founder and CEO of online mobile recharge venture FreeCharge.

SpoonJoy also recently received an undisclosed amount in funding from Flipkart's co-founder Sachin Bansal; its chief product officer Mekin Maheshwari; Sahil Barua, co-founder of Delhivery; and Abhishek Goyal, founder of Tracxn.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)