Coffee Startup Blue Tokai bags a fresh round of seed funding

When Namrata Asthana moved to Delhi a few years ago, she was quite surprised that we started our Monday (read: everyday) mornings with a coffee that simply wasn’t right. When she suggested to her ever supportive husband Matt Chitharanjan that they open a roastery, he laughed. After he’d laughed for a good long minute, the economist in him started considering the idea. A few months later, bluetokaicoffee.com was born. 

The How and the Why

Three year old startup, Blue Tokai keeps their coffee elite by handpicking it from India’s finest estates and profile roasting it. Now, coming to the interesting part- what is profile roasting and how does it pack a punch in your coffee. Profile roasting is an advanced roasting technique that lets the coffee bean decide what temperature it wants to roast at and how long it wants to sit in there. Basically, different beans, different needs. And Blue Tokai, with its state-of-the-art facility in Delhi is doing just that. 

And to keep their coffee fresh and handsome, they ship the very next day- to customers online and offline to cafes and restaurants. 

Coming to the Moolah

This round of funding saw participation from Snow Leopard Ventures and Bold Ventures. 

“The capital infusion comes at an exciting phase of our journey. We have already built a loyal and steadily growing clientele over the last few years and are now ready to expand the market and bring the specialty coffee experience to a whole new set of customers,” Matt said.

The coffee duo is all set to open a roastery in Mumbai by mid 2016 and use the funding to launch new products and build a robust and sustainable technological interface, which would be able to provide better customer experience.

Blue Tokai takes its model from other coffee e-tailers like theindianbean.com and thecoffeecoach.in.

With DropKaffe and Teabox getting funded not too long ago, we’d say the sector is at the right temperature for another investment. Any takers?