B2B foodtech startup HungerBox raises $12 million led by Paytm, NPTK

Bengaluru headquartered HungerBox, which offers corporate organisations technology solutions for food ordering and vendor management, has raised $12 million in a Series B round from new investors Paytm and NPTK Emerging Asia Fund. 

Returning investors in the round were Sabre Partners and Neoplux, said a statement issued by the company.

Part of the infusion was reported earlier based on filings with the Registrar of Companies in August  

Owned and operated by Eat Good Technologies, the B2B foodtech company had last raised a Series A round led by South Korean investment firm Neoplux and mid-market private equity firm Sabre Partners in 2018. 

The company will utilise the capital to fuel expansion to 10 new cities in India and entry to the Southeast Asia markets by March 2020. Currently HungerBox has operations in 18 cities in India and employs 1,500 staff and has empanelled 2,100 food partners.

The HungerBox platform allows caterers at large institutions such as IT parks, hospitals, educational institutes and retail with the ability to track the entire F&B operation including food consumption, orders and feedback. For the employees, the app provides features such as pre-ordering, live order tracking, digital payments, desk-based ordering, food ordering for meeting rooms, food ordering for organisational events and nutrition tracking.

“Our ambition is to become the world’s number one institutional foodtech company. In order to do this, we are following a three-pronged approach by deepening engagement into the corporate sector where we already serve marquee businesses in India spanning 18 cities, expanding into sectors which reveal massive scope for improving F&B management, such as education, healthcare (hospitals) and retail (malls), where we have already made headway, and expanding geographically beyond India,” said Sandipan Mitra, CEO of HungerBox.

This is Mitra’s second venture after he founded online food ordering platform Hungry in Bengaluru and sold it to UK based food-tech platform, JustEat. He co-founded HungerBox in 2016 with JustEat colleague, Uttam Kumar who served as the national sales head at Rocket Internet backed food ordering platform Foodpanda, later acquired by Ola. 

“We continue to focus on adding new use cases to our payments business and digitizing offline transactions. HungerBox is the market leader in the institutional FoodTech space and we will partner closely with them and bring the benefits of Paytm ecosystem to HungerBox,” said Madhur Deora, president at Paytm on the investment.

The B2B space in food technology has seen multiple companies in the space being backed by institutional investors. Swiggy and Zomato have also tried entering the space which offers consistent orders and stickiness. 

Hyderabad based hospitality-as-a-service platform, Food n i raised a seed round from Sanjay Jesrani of Go North Ventures and others in November.

Bengaluru based SmartQ backed by Yournest had acquired Nexus backed GoodBox in 2018 Food delivery and restaurant booking platform Zomato had acquired Bengaluru based Tonguestun in March 2018 to scale its b2b vretical.