[Funding alert] Retail tech startup NutriTap raises $1.5 million in funding

NutriTap Technologies, a Retail tech startup has raised $1.5 million in Pre-Series A funding round from Venture Catalysts, LetsVenture, IK Capital, Elysian Fintech and a few marquee HNIS from the retail industry.

The startup plans to use the funds to scale up in-house technology, invest in R&D, and expand presence across regions and cities.

Gurugram-based NutriTap was founded in 2018 by Rajesh Kumar and Priyank Tewari, it creates an alternative retail channel for the brand to do direct-to-customer (D2C) retail.

The company’s full stack retail expertise includes smart kiosk technology and simplified distribution mechanisms.

“In India, kiosk-based retail is now accepted as an alternate mode of retailing. To make sure that customers get the right retailing solution, you need to have the right technology to do that. At NutriTap, we are building the technology to address this alternate channel market which stands at $10 billion”, said, Rajesh Kumar, cofounder of NutriTap.

There are limited players in India who can create efficient unmanned retail infrastructure and there is also heavy dependence on import of old and costly vending machines from global markets.

The retail tech startup claims to have addressed this issue through the creation of in-house, patented, retail kiosk technology that includes machine design, payment hardware, backend software and data and business insight capabilities.

“While traditionally, alternate, kiosk based retail has been associated with vending machines and has been very limited to either corporate snacking or residential grocery categories, we believe that our technology has the potential to cater to the larger FMCG retail market and bring in a D2C flavour for brands across multiple categories,” said, Priyank Tewari, co-founder of NutriTap.

Currently, the startup operates over 250 smart retail kiosk locations in Tier 1 metro cities of India.

“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.

The company is looking to enable smart retail across 800 locations in the next one year and over 2,500 locations across India’s top metro cities in the next two years.

“NutriTap was able to not just survive back-to-back COVID waves, but also posted solid growth numbers on the back of timely pivots. We trust the capability of the founders in building a full stack alternate retail company and executing the vision of making retail easier and accessible for customers and brands”, said, Ishank Kumar, managing partner of IK Capital.

About NutriTap

NutriTap brings nutritious yet delicious foods and beverages on tap through state-of-the-art automated retail machines. Their mission is to bring health and nutrition into busy and sedentary corporate life. Through their innovative, tech-driven and anywhere-anytime automated retailing machines, they bring healthy foods and beverages at an arm’s length of a corporate employee.

Their team of nutritionists work overtime to scan through a range of health foods available nationally and locally and then carefully select products that are best suited to the needs of present-day lifestyle challenges. Employees love NutriTap because they get what they want and when they want within 45 seconds through the digital payment channel of their choice NutriTap takes pride in serving organizations that really care about their employees’​ health and wellness.