They left dream jobs in New York to disrupt Starbucks

They were three bright, young professionals in the land of dreams. They had what most people would call dream jobs at KPMG – one of the ‘Big Four’ auditors – in New York City. But Rakshit Kejriwal, Lakshmi Dasaka, and Chaitanya Chitta yearned to build something of their own. That was about eight years ago.

Today, the three friends are celebrating. They have a winner with five-month-old DropKaffe, which sells coffee to high-strung, caffeine-wired Bangaloreans in their offices.

The city has been brimming with startups which deliver food on-demand lately. But for that much-needed dose of caffeine, office-goers were at the mercy of vending machines that put out syrupy sweet liquid masquerading as coffee, or the make-shift tea-and-coffee shops by the streetside. Of course, Starbucks and its clones catered to those who didn’t mind spending a lot of time and money for a cup of coffee, but who could really afford to take such costly breaks during work? That’s the raw nerve Rakshit, Lakshmi, and Chaitanya chose to sooth with DropKaffe.

“We wanted to build something that didn’t exist. Coffee as a category is huge. And yet there was nobody delivering a good cup of it. Starbucks have had the plan for a long time but never did it. So we thought, let’s see if this idea has any merit,” Chaitanya recalls their first move. They ran a Facebook ad for 10 days, saying something like this: “Your office coffee sucks. If we promise you a freshly brewed cup of coffee delivered at your desk, will you try it?”

Rakshit can’t help smiling as he tells me about the response to the ad: “We had about 5,000 people signing up in no time.” That spurred them on to find a way to deliver on their promise.

Yesterday the startup announced its first funding round of US$300,000 from prolific angel investor Manish Singhal, San Francisco-based P39 Capital, and a few angel investors from the US, India, and Singapore.

But before we dive into the cool DropKaffe brew, we have to backstroke into the team’s first startup, SmartOn Learning.

Education wasn’t their cup of coffee

Work, studies, and life in general took Rakshit, Lakshmi, and Chaitanya different ways from New York, but the three friends came together again two years ago to start a company in the booming education space. The idea was to bridge the gap between traditional education and employability with well-tailored massive open online courses. Lakshmi and Chaitanya were married by then, with a one-year-old child.

That’s when I first met them. “The value of traditional degrees is declining as the focus is shifting more towards the skills and competencies of the candidates rather than their credentials. In a country like India, higher education faces several infrastructure and quality challenges. These are affecting the employability and career prospects of millions of students,” Rakshit and Chaitanya had explained at the time when I asked why they chose to found SmartOn.

Chaitanya had earlier worked in the higher education space during his six-year stint as a director at KPMG. Rakshit was a certified Chartered Accountant with an MBA from Columbia Business School, New York. And Lakshmi held a master’s degree from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

SmartOn started offering its courses in ecommerce, digital marketing, UX design, growth hacking, and so on in October 2013, and soon roped in a few high-profile partners, including Columbia University, KPMG, Shopify, and Canvas.

A here, now, and growing market

Coffee isn’t incidental

A coffee cup ecosystem