The capital raised will be used to ramp up in-house technology, invest in R&D and grow presence across sectors and cities.
NutriTap, founded in 2018 by IIT Kharagpur alumni Rajesh Kumar and Priyank Tewari, creates alternate retail channels for brands to do direct-to-customer (D2C) retail. The startup’s full-stack retail expertise includes smart kiosk technology and simplified distribution mechanism.
“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.
India has limited players which can create efficient unmanned retailing infrastructure and also have high dependence on importing archaic and expensive vending machines from global markets. NutriTap claims to have addressed the issue through building in-house, patented, retail kiosk technology which includes machine design, payment hardware, backend software and data and business insight capabilities.
NutriTap currently operates over 250 smart retail kiosks locations across the tier 1 metro cities of India.
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“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 cofounder 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 more than 2,500 locations in the top metro cities of India 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.
