The Kerala Angel Network (KAN), an initiative of TiE Kerala, has invested in two South Indian start-ups - Chennai-based digital home-cooking firm Cookd and Kochi-based talent-hiring venture Zappyhire.
Founded in 2020, the digital-first cooking brand focuses on making cooking at home easy, efficient, and fun. Cookd is a D2C digital home-cooking, content, community, and e-commerce company built for home cooks, cooking enthusiasts, and foodies to search, watch, and cook new recipes every day and supply them to consumers using the platform.
Cookd has raised Rs 4.40 crore from KAN, Konglo Ventures, and their existing investors.
The Kochi-based Zappyhire, founded in 2018, is an intelligent recruitment platform that helps enterprises screen, engage, and hire the best talent faster, using Artificial Intelligence (AI). Zappyhire has raised Rs 3.71 crore from KAN, Hedge Finance and other angel investors.
"India does not have many brands that go beyond posting recipes online to increase their following. Cookd shows a lot of promise in terms of integrating content, technology, and e-commerce to build an end-to-end solution," said Ajit A Moopan, the lead investor and president of KAN.
"We are building one of the largest home-cooking brands, based on deep insights gathered from our fast-growing community of home cooks. Our new range of Cookd products will help our users have their favourite dishes faster and more accurately," said Aathitiyan, founder and CEO of Cookd.
The Zappyhire platform auto pre-screens and ranks the candidates from a large application pool using a semantic resume parser and AI-enabled video interview. The platform helps eliminate human effort on scheduling/ rescheduling interviews and post-offer-engagement to reduce the offer-drop-out ratio using conversation AI.
Zappyhire has grown exponentially in the last one year and added many enterprises, SMEs, and funded start-ups to their client portfolio. The company recently associated with many government-sponsored digital hiring initiatives, Jyothis KS and Deepu Xavier, co-founders of Zappyhire said.
KAN brings together a number of angel investors from across Kerala, who share a passion for nurturing and investing in start-ups and early-stage businesses with exponential growth potential. Started in 2019, KAN has made a number of strategic investments across sectors worth Rs 12.12 crore.