Home food marketplace Cookr bags $1 Mn in Pre Seed round

Home food tech marketplace startup Cookr has raised $1 million (Rs. 8.25 Crores) pre-seed investment led by angels who work at Microsoft, Amazon, Intel, Titan Company, M2P Fintech’s co-founders, WilcoSource LLC, RXDataScience Inc, Quadrand Resource LLC, and the Social Company.

The company plans to deploy the raised funds to add more features to the platform, expand the team, and launch the marketplace across India, and make healthy eating more accessible to people across the country, Cookr said in a press release.

Launched by Praba Santhanakrishnana, Saravanakumar Kandasamy and Nirmalkumar Muthu, Cookr offers a range of nutritious and hygienic home-cooked food options with more than 500 home cooks on the platform, catering to customers’ dietary needs and preferences. Cookr connects with home cooks to deliver home-cooked meals directly from their homes. 

Cookr has positioned itself as an alternative to restaurant-delivered food without compromising taste or quality. The Chennai-based startup claims that all its partner cooks are FSSAI-certified and currently operational in nine cities in Tamil Nadu, Coimbatore, Madurai, Trichy, Hosur, Chidambaram, Thanjavur, Salem, Vellore, and Kumbakonam.

The company looks to onboard 2,00,000 home cooks over the next 5 years and competes with the likes of Dotshot, NatureBox, Evo Foods, et al.

Concept of home cooked food is not new and several players in the past tried this model. However, most of them failed to scale. One such company was HolaChef which was backed by Kalaari. The Mumbai-based company was acquired by Ola’s Foodpanda in a fire sale in October 2018.