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Chai Point on Thursday, announced a $20 million (₹131 crore) Series C funding round, led by Paragon Partners.
This is the largest-ever round in its industry vertical. The company, founded in 2010, has so far raised $34 million (₹223 crore), and runs India’s largest Chai retail company with 100 stores in eight cities.
All the existing investors — Eight Roads (Fidelity’s India PE arm), Saama Capital and DSG — participated in this round, with some of them investing super pro rata, the Bengaluru-based firm said in a statement.
Chai Point is India’s largest organised brand in the ₹1.5l lakh crore Chai market. With the average per capita consumption of the beverage increasing at a steady rate of 20-30 per cent, the market is ever expanding. Chai Point sells three lakh cups of tea a day across all its channels — stores, delivery, and dispensers — and is poised to do five times more in the next 3 years, said Amuleek Singh Bijral, co-founder and CEO.
He said this funding round is primarily aimed at further strengthening the brand’s multi-channel go-to-market. A substantial portion of investment proceeds will go towards deepening sales, marketing, and service operations for automated hot beverage dispensing business — boxC.in — which is the next growth driver.
Professor Tarun Khanna, Harvard Business School, co-founder at Chai Point, said the firm is using technology to enhance customer experience, and making efforts towards environmental sustainability.
Siddharth Parekh, co-founder and Senior Partner, Paragon Partners, will also be joining the company’s Board. DCS Advisory India (earlier Signal Hill Capital) was the exclusive advisor to the company for this fund raise.
Chai Point is an omnichannel company with stores, delivery and fresh-milk based dispenser platform called boxC.in as its operating channels. It is set to launch its 100th store in May 2018 and has deployed close to 2,000 fresh-milk based dispensers. Chai Point is also the country’s largest hot beverage delivery brand and recently delivered its 11th lakh flask. Key to Chai Point’s multi-channel capability is its proprietary cloud-based platform called SHARK.
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