TravelKhana raises funding as a part of $10Mn series A round of funding from Astrac Ventures and other individuals. Earlier it had raised angel funds for about $2 Mn from Google’s Rajan Anandan, Alok Mittal and more.
TravelKhana
TravelKhana is online meal booking platform for train passengers by connecting passengers to food caterers across all Indian Railway network. TravelKhana is delhi based venture started by BITS graduate Pushpinder Singh in 2012, TravelKhana has 150 stations currently in its network and serves around 3000 passengers per day. With current annual revenue of $15Mn TravelKhana plans to expand its network to 250 more stations by next year.
Astarc Ventures
Astrac Ventures is Mumbai based investment firm. It has also invested $1 Mn in Hyderabad-based Online Home Décor firm, Renderlogy. In near future they plan to invest in many other areas like mobile payments, digital healthcare, consumer internet, internet of things, digital communication, 3 D printing, data analytics areas and more.
Other Players and the scope in the Field
Before starting the statistics, The statement that comes out my heart at the moment is “We are Indians and we love food… :-)”. Events in India cannot success unless people like the cuisine served.
A huge population of India rely on Indian Railways to travel. According to data present on Wikipedia, Indian Railways is one of the world’s largest railway networks comprising 115,000 km (71,000 mi) of track over a route of 65,436 km (40,660 mi) and 7,172 stations. In 2014-15, Indian Railways carried 8.397 billion passengers annually or more than 23 million passengers a day (roughly half of whom were suburban passengers) and 1050.18 million tons of freight in the year. Thus it is clear that it is the huge market for caterers to make good money.
Other players in this field currently providing their services are YatraChef, TravelXiaka, TravelThali, Khanaonline and TravelerFood etc.