Food Delivery Startup Box8 Has Raised $7.5 Million in Series B Funding

Mumbai-based food delivery startup Box8 has raised $7.5 million in Series B funding from IIFL Seed Ventures Fund and Mayfield Ventures. The funds raised will go into strengthing the supply chain, building superior technology, enhancing product development and expanding into new geographies.

Amit Raj, one of the co-founders spoke about the expansion plans with Inc42 and said, “Our strategy of establishing ourselves in certain key markets, instead of spreading wide and thin has helped us scale fast and develop a loyal customer base in a capital efficient manner. With the growing working class and their changing lifestyle preferences, there is immense potential to be tapped. This new influx of capital will allow us to capitalise on the opportunity by expanding to three to four more cities using the same micro intensive approach.”

Box8 was founded in 2012 by IIT Kharagpur graduates Amit Raj and Anshul Gupta is a full stack online delivery company with a menu that has over 100 dishes ranging from Indian meals to biryani, wraps, sandwiches and salads. Started as Poncho, a QSR for Mexican food, the company rebranded to Indian food and rebranded in 2014. As a full-stack company, Box8 handles everything from buying the raw materials to preparation and delivery. Box8 serves over 12,000 meals every day through a network of 60 stores in Mumbai, Pune and Bengaluru. In 2015, Box8 raised $3.5 million in Series A funding from Mayfield, a Silicon Valley-based early-stage venture capital firm.

Real-time decision making is the key in any operationally intensive business. With an integrated platform that cuts across customers, delivery units, kitchen & vendors, we have a live single window that speeds up decision making not just for our ground crew but also for our central teams. Two key areas we are focussing on going forward are automation and prediction. While technology and data, has helped us identify challenges, automation will help address them and prediction will help us understand consumer preferences better,” said co-founder Anshul Gupta when talking about the operational efficiencies.

IIFL Seed Ventures Fund, one of the investors in this round, is the venture capital and private equity arm of IIFL Wealth & Asset Management. Last year, they raised a sector-agnostic fund to invest in early and growth stage companies. Box8 is the first food business that they’ve invested in.