Mumbai, May 10
Retail tech start-up NutriTap Technologies has raised about $1.5 million in a pre-series A round from Venture Catalysts, LetsVenture, IK Capital, Elysian Fintech and a few HNIs from the retail industry, the company has said.
Founded in 2018 by IIT Kharagpur alumni Rajesh Kumar and Priyank Tewari, the company creates alternative retail channels for brands to do Direct-to-Customer (D2C) Retail.
The capital raised will help the company ramp up in-house technology, invest in R&D and grow its presence across sectors and cities.
“In India, kiosk-based retail is now accepted as an alternative mode of retailing. To make sure that customers get the right retailing solution, you need to have the right technology . At NutriTap, we are building the technology to address this alternative channel market,” said Rajesh Kumar, co-founder of NutriTap.
NutriTap builds in-house, patented, retail kiosk technology, which includes machine design, payment hardware, backend software and data and business insight capabilities. It currently operates over 250 smart retail kiosk locations across the Tier-I metro cities.
“While traditionally, alternate, kiosk-based retail has been associated with vending machines and has been limited to either the corporate snacking or residential grocery categories, we believe that our technology has the potential to cater to the larger FMCG retail market and brings in a D2C flavour for brands across multiple categories,” said co-founder Priyank Tewari.
“What NutriTap is building will propel them to become the category leaders in this still nascent space of unmanned, alternate retailing and we believe that they have the right team to make this happen,” said Apoorva Ranjan Sharma of Venture Catalysts.
NutriTap aims to enable smart retail across 800 locations in the next one year and in over 2,500 locations in the top metro cities in the next two years.