Launched in 2015 by Rajesh Sawhney, Sanjeev Singhal and Bal Dighent, Innerchef offers ready-to-eat meals and desserts. It had earlier raised around $1.5 million from tech entrepreneurs like redBus Founder Phanindra Sharma, Paytm Founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Shaadi.com Founder Anupam Mittal and GOQii Founder Vishal Gondal.
Mistletoe is funded and owned by Taizo Son, serial entrepreneur and youngest brother of Masayoshi Son, CEO of Japanese telecommunication and internet corp SoftBank. He is also founder of Japan-based mobile gaming company GungHo, in which SoftBank had acquired a 51% share in 2013 for $1.53 billion. GungHo bought back most of its shares from SoftBank earlier this year.
Sawhney, also the founder of Gurugram-based accelerator programme GSF Accelerator, plans to deploy the funds to focus on the top locations of InnerChef — Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad.
“We plan to invest the money in building a brand. We have started adding more kitchens across our four locations. Desserts in InnerChef are taken care of by women entrepreneurs, who are mainly neighbourhood chefs. We are looking to enable 10,000 women entrepreneurs who can make a livelihood on our platform. We want to focus on the first foru cities for the next six months,” he said.
Since its launch in 2013, Mistletoe has made over 10 investments globally and its portfolio includes South-east Asia’s largest unicorn with a valuation of $3.75 billion – Singapore-based internet company, GARENA, and Silicon Valley-based unicorn, Zoox, a driverless car startup.
“Mistletoe explored investment opportunities of the corrective impacts on food and farming sector. We believe that InnerChef would become the crucial model of improving the food and farming ecosystem in India,” said Atisushi Tairo, Chief Growth Officer, Mistletoe.
Taira, who was previously the CEO at Bharti SoftBank, said it sees the chaos in various Indian sectors as an opportunity to leapfrog by leveraging the latest technologies of AI, robotics, IoT, and internet. “There is an attractive pool of talent that consist of ex-Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and smart young people graduating from top-notch universities. Huge opportunities plus upcoming technologies and infrastructure make India a big interest for us,” he said.
Source: Times of India