No more eating out: startup gets food cooking in your kitchen

If you live in a city, have a job, and are a nuclear or single person home, chances are that the most dreaded question you answer everyday is, “What shall we eat?”
The fast-paced lifestyles of urban Indians have caused a boom in online food delivery services in the country, but that does not fill the gap.

One simply cannot eat restaurant food every day. Add to that the fact that Indians are getting increasingly health conscious, and Zomato and Swiggy don’t feel like the answer to all food problems after all.

That is the gap Ajay Modani, co-founder of Capillary Technologies, and Harsh Singla have been trying to fill since Ajay quit the Bangalore-based, Singapore-headquartered company.

See: 15 top funded startups in Singapore

Like its name suggests, Cookifi acts as an on-demand chef hiring service.

“We have three models. One is Cookifi Subscription, which is for daily needs and [paid] on a monthly basis. We also have Cookify on Demand, where the cook will arrive for one hour for your one time needs. The third is Cookifi Experience in which you get a luxury experience, where you can hire a cook for a live counter and more exotic needs,” Ajay said.

The on demand home services industry is worth about US$7 billion in the country. Home cooks and chefs are a cool $5 billion, Ajay said.

That might sound like great potential, but standardizing an industry that primarily works on word-of-mouth reference and is vastly unorganized is a challenge very few startups have been able to overcome. Most home services companies have to regularly deal with complaints about inept service providers or bad customer service, undercutting the very value proposition they sell to users.

Ajay and his team of seven have, to date, accepted about 1,200 jobs on Cookifi- a number more reflective of the challenges in the industry than the hot potential of the sector.

However, his aim is to take Cookifi a notch up come late February, when the company will get a new Android app, along with some pumped-up marketing to make the startup popular with customers.

No prizes for guessing, that’s around when Ajay hopes to close an Angel funding round, worth around US$1.5 million. So far, Cookifi has been using the money Ajay got from his exit from Capillary in March.

What’s cooking?