In the world of Zomato, Swiggy, cloud kitchens, and ready-to-eat there is a whole new set of young people who are moving towards a healthy lifestyle and cooking. Unfortunately, the time to experiment with the food and cook it perfectly in the first go is not everyone’s cup of tea. It is here that Bengaluru-based Upliance.AI claims to have found its playground. “We have now 25,000 meals cooked for customers on both the app and the device. For instance, we have approximately 420 unique recipes that people have cooked and we have cross-promoted food as well. For instance, a lot of people in South India have been introduced to delicacies like Pav Bhaji on the other hand consumers in Western India have been introduced to Paliyan,”, Mahek Mody, co-founder and CEO, said.
The start-up introduced its first product delishUp, an automated cooking appliance currently available at Rs 23,999 across India. The device features a touch screen with in-built guided recipes (thanks to OTA and ChatGPT), coupled with a jar that heats and cooks, and offers controlled chopping, stirring, and other culinary functions. The connected features offer a range of recipes which are designed in-house and added features like nutritional information, grocery shopping, menu planning, and more. The start-up further claims that this has helped not only bring in more appeal to customers but also drive organic sales through word-of-mouth publicity. The company first started pilot sales in December 2022, and within a year, it claims to have managed to sell around 1,000 units.
It had raised $1.3 million (Rs 12 crore) from early Tesla & SpaceX investor Tim Draper and Rainmatter (a Zerodha initiative) in 2022. Additionally, co-founders of Ather Energy, Unacademy, and Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs India are also some of the early investors among others. And recently, it raised Rs 34 crore at a valuation of Rs 143 crore in a Seed round, led by Khosla Ventures, one of the early investors in OpenAI.
Future expansion
According to the start-up, it has slowly and steadily built its processes, products, and services in place. The idea is to target and have sustained growth. In fact, the co-founders opine that while there have been a lot of advances in several consumer tech spaces, kitchen appliances have more or less remained the same over the decades. delishUp is just the first of many products the start-up aims to bring to the market. It is estimated that the Indian consumer appliance industry is valued at about $30 billion (Rs 249,930 crore) and is growing at 14% CAGR. Upliance.AI aims to capture 20% of this market over the next eight years.
According to the founders, it is already on track to produce 500 units a month, and target to produce 20,000 units a month in the next six months. The duo claimed that they have set a gross revenue target of Rs 150 crore by end-2024. It will also expand its service network to a greater number of cities from the existing five to 16 this February.
Funding and investment
The company says the recent pre-seed investment of Rs 34 crore from Khosla Ventures will go towards tooling and expanding its manufacturing capacity. Furthermore, it has already placed orders for Rs 50 crore worth of appliances. “As we start advertising and start expanding in multiple cities, we will organically get there,” said Mohit Sharma, co-founder and CTO, Upliance.ai.
The co-founders elaborate that unlike some other start-ups they “don’t need hundreds of crores of funding in the long run to be profitable. We probably need one more round after this that is of a similar order. Another Rs 50-60 crore which means that we will generate enough money so that we can keep reinvesting to make the brand happen. We think more like a traditional company. In the long run, we want to be on the trajectory of established brands. And in the short run, we are on a startup trajectory. We are sort of charting between the two,” the duo explained.
Going global is also something that they would look at in the future. “We have an export market waiting for us, which is what even the government is excited about, like a more Indian product going out of the country. That is for late 2024. I think there is still a lot of demand in India and we will focus on India first,” Sharma.