Rocket Internet Startup FoodPanda- Order Food Fast and Hassle Free

Tuesday May 29, 2012 , 3 min Read

Founded by Akhilesh Bali and Amit Kohli, FoodPanda is a Rocket Internet Incubatee. Rocket Internet is the largest incubator of eCommerce companies globally and entered India with Crazeal and then followed it up with ventures in other verticals like Jabong, FabFurnish, OfficeYes and FoodPanda. “Overall, Rocket has strong belief in the India story and sees India as one of the largest potential markets globally. Hence, there are aggressive plans to expand into a few more verticals within this year itself,” says Akhilesh.

Rocket Internet plays an active investor role for the ventures. Besides the seed funding, it also helps with the IT and physical infrastructure that is required to get a company off-ground initially. The important thing with an incubator is that there is a healthy flow of best practices and learnings between ventures so one doesn't end up reinventing the wheel and moves much faster towards execution.

FoodPanda’s value proposition is to make ordering food for home delivery fast and hassle free for the consumers. “Instead of hunting for the number of the restaurant from where you want to order food, and going through the whole process of repeating your contact information and delivery address, you just call on our central delivery number or place the order online or through the mobile application, and we’ll get the restaurant to deliver the food hot and steamy to your door step,” explains Akhilesh.

Co-founded along with Amit Kohli, the two member team has a strong technical background. Amit comes with 7 years’ experience as a consultant with McKinsey and is passionate about the online space. While Akhilesh is an ISB alumus and has previously run his own start-up Mithaimate.com, which is India’s largest online Sweets Store. Besides the two, there’s a strong 15 member team comprising sales, marketing and operations.

“We have a few more revenue channels that we may look to tap into as we build scale and expand into more cities. Given our aggressive marketing plans, we’ll generate healthy incremental business for the restaurants partnering with us, in lieu of which we’ll share revenues with them on the orders originating from our end,” says Akhilesh about the revenue model.

The operations were launched in Singapore followed by other countries in South-East Asia. Currently, FoodPanda is live in 8 countries with plans to add a few more in the coming months. “While the operations are run independently in each country, there is an active sharing of learnings across countries. This helps in a big way to capitalize on the cross country synergies, and makes sure we learn from each other’s success and mistakes,” adds Akhilesh.

FoodPanda had a beta-launch in Gurgaon last month and some BTL marketing to generate some business. The promotions at a full-scale begin in the month of June as FoodPanda expand their offerings to all of Delhi-NCR and subsequently to other cities.

More about FoodPanda on their site.

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