Jolly Food Fellow raises $302K in angel funding

Ahmedabad-based Jolly Food Fellow, a startup which assists food & beverage entrepreneurs with customer analytics, has raised Rs 2 crore ($302,600) in angel funding from a new startup incubator, The 1947.

Ahmedabad-based TECHRECO Solutions Pvt Ltd, which owns and operates Jolly Food Fellow, will use the money to expand its footprint in metro cities such as Mumbai and Bangalore over the next three months, as per a press statement.

Jolly Food Fellow was founded in March 2015 by two IITians—Rajiv Sharma and Niraj Harlalka. Both have almost a decade of experience with software product management firms.

In 2010, Sharma co-founded JOULES, a juice cafe chain, while Harlalka has developed an online education ERP software.

Jolly Food Fellow partners with food tech entrepreneurs and helps them know more about their customers through analytics.

The 1947 is a new tech incubator that aims to provide mentoring support, 'entrepreneur- in-residence' and 'investor-in-residence' programmes to Gujarat-based startups.

"Bringing simple, scalable and commercially viable solutions is all we need. Gujarat is the most enterprising land, but I have noticed a lack of ecosystem for investment in startups. This is what led me to start The 1947," said Suvas Barot, MD of Creative Infocity Ltd, which runs The 1947.

Creative Infocity is Gujarat's first integrated IT park.

The 1947 will invest up to Rs 5 crore in tech startups by March 2016.

The food tech space in India is currently one of the hottest segments with a few companies raising funds from VC firms, as per VC funding data from VCCEdge, the data research platform of VCCircle.

Recently, Bangalore-based Bundl Technologies Pvt Ltd, which owns and operates online food ordering startup Swiggy.com, has raised Series B funding of $16.5 million (around Rs 102 crore) in a round led by Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) for expanding its geographical footprint and brand building.

Also, Delhi-NCR-based Bite Club raised Rs 3 crore from Powai Lake Ventures and angels such as Aneesh Reddy of Capillary Technologies, Ashish Kashyap of Goibibo Group and Alok Mittal of Canaan Partners. In February, food technology and delivery start-up YuMist raised about Rs 6.2 crore from venture capital firm Orios Venture Partners.

The biggest deal in this space was that of TinyOwl which raised Rs 100 crore in its Series B round from Matrix Partners, Sequoia Capital and Nexus Venture Partners, while Foodpanda raised $110 million for its global plans.