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ChaiPoint , India’s leading organised retail tea chain, is targeting a Series C funding of $20-25 million (Rs 130-163 crore) in the first quarter of the fiscal 2018-19 (April-June 2018) and expand its footprint across urban India.
Earlier, the Bengaluru-based startup had raised $12.5 million (Rs 81 crore), including Series A funding of $2 million (Rs 13 crore), Amuleek Singh Bijral, Co-Founder and CEO, told BusinessLine on Wednesday.
Chai Point is backed by marquee investors like DSG Capital, Saama Capita and Eight Road Ventures. It also plans to enter Chennai in the next few weeks and is soon signing up with Flipkart as exclusive Chai partner on their campus.
ChaiPoint is set to open its 100th store in the next few weeks. In 2018-19, it also plans to open 50 new stores across geographies, focusing mainly in Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Pune and Hyderabad and also in Bengaluru and Chennai, Bijral said.
The chain is also present in Gurugram and Noida.
Bijral, a Harvard graduate, had co-founded ChaiPoint in April 2010 as an omni-channel B2C brand that also involved home delivery, penetration in corporate segment and loose leaf tea (LLT).
The startup is using technology to fix the last mile broken delivery of chai in India.“One of our flagship offerings is an Android-based boxC.in, an IoT enabled tea/coffee-dispensing machine, targeted at the corporate sector. This machine is replacing the traditional vending machines in the offices, which dispensed premixed tea and coffee.’’
Bijral said ChaiPoint is focusing on fresh milk-based solutions in boxC.in to dispense with authentically brewed tea and coffee in corporate offices. It has already installed nearly 2,000 such machines and plans to double the number this year.
boxC.in, a cloud-based beverage services platform serving tea and filter coffee through fully automatic dispensers, currently contributes 40 per cent to the company’s total revenues.
Bijral said ChaiPoint has developed the boxC.in technology and has partnered with others to provide the dispensers.
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