[Funding] Kitchens Centre raises funds in Pre Series A Round from Village Global

Delhi-based Shared Kitchen startup Kitchens Centre has raised an undisclosed Pre Series A from Village Global. The Company raised a seed round of $500,000 in April this year from AngelList India. Village Global is an early-stage venture capital firm backed by the world's most successful entrepreneurs, including Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Eric Schmidt, Disney’s Bob Iger and more.

Talking about the investment, Eric Torenberg, Co-Founder, Village Global, says that the sector has a significant investment opportunity. Further, he adds that startup, Kitchens Centre, has a data-driven approach to property acquisition and sales management. This ensures maximisation of occupancy and unit economics.

India is one of the largest and fastest growing F&B consumption markets. So, according to Eric, Kitchens Centre stands in the right place to address a market gap. It enables restaurants, food entrepreneurs as well as FMCG brands to take advantage of the boom in delivery/ logistics and achieve higher ROI.

About Kitchens Centre

Lakshay Jain founded Kitchens Centre in 2019. The Shared kitchen startup provides infrastructure and tech solutions to online food and FMCG brands. The startups follows an approach to build ready to move kitchens. It offers key benefits for brand partners with the fully fitted kitchen, which makes it easier for brands to launch operations and/or penetrate the market faster.

Lakshay Jain, Founder, Kitchens Centre says, that the startup provided the obvious benefit of cost reduction. He further adds, "We also aim to create an incubated ecosystem. This will have tech solutions, supply chain, logistics support and platform aggregation. Moreover with the pandemic still very much prevalent, the food delivery business is prospering and gaining momentum in the food services industry.”

Kitchens Centre Operations

Kitchens Centre started operations with two locations in Delhi. Over the course of 1 year, they have scaled up to 35+ locations across 15 cities pan India. The company has a network of 200+ kitchen units presently. It also works with over 50 F&B brands like Choko La, Mamagoto, Biryani Blues, Sleepy Owl, Cross Border Kitchen, Masala story - Punjabi by nature, Fat Lulu’s, Nirula’s, Maalgaadi by Dhaba Estd 1986 and more.

Furthermore, the company is planning to expand further by adding more than 90+ new locations and 550 units over the next one year. Currently, the startup is managing 100,000 sq.ft space with 50+ team members. This number will defineitly grow rapidly as they are actively recruiting team members across the board.

As food delivery is expected to outpace dining/ at-restaurant sales in the next 9-12 months, Kitchens Centre is aspiring to partner with many more restaurants & food-tech startups to accelerate their growth story.

This concept is finding a lot of traction in the global markets as well - more recently, Virtual Kitchen Co. (USA), Karma Kitchen (UK) and Zuul (USA) have raised significant growth capital.