India-based food delivery startup Yumist has raised $2 million in its pre-Series A round. The leading investor was Unilazer Ventures, owned by Ronnie Screwvala. Existing investors Orios VP and Steven Lurie also participated in the round.
The money is going to be used to increase the scale of operations to eight cities from the current three.
The brain behind Yumist is Zomato ex-CMO Alok Jain and Abhimanyu Maheshwari, a food and beverage entrepreneur who founded the Zing restaraunts.
"Having come from Zomato and seen what's happening, a lot of tech stuff is happening [in the food industry] but there's also a large market for daily meals. People are very price-sensitive and don't want to spend more than a dollar," Jain told TechCrunch in an interview.
Unlike food delivery apps like Zomato and FoodPanda, which get restaurant-made food to customers, Yumist is cooking its own food and delivering to customers at affordable prices.
"This market is 20 times larger than the restaurant industry, but hasn't seen any change over last five decades. Yet, if I need a cab, I press a button and get it. The consumer has evolved but the experience in the daily meals market hasn't," said Jain. "We initially tested our unit economics, and then tested scale. We're in business to make profits and gain scale."
The company wants to reduce its cost per delivery from Rs 35 to Rs 20.
There are 200 employees, of which 20 are non-operational and based in the headquarters in Gurgaon.
"After this round, we will still keep our heads down until March in our current three cities, and show that we can be gross margin profitable at a company level," said Jain.
