India’s Teabox brews $6M series A funding to grow global brand for premium teas

Here’s a startup that’s my cup of tea – it’s called Teabox. The India-based specialist ecommerce store today revealed that it has secured US$6 million in series A funding. It comes exactly a year after investors first got a taste of the online tea brand’s potential when it brewed up US$1 million in seed funding.

Kaushal Dugar (pictured below), Teabox founder and CEO, tells Tech in Asia that the biggest customer bases for its own-brand premium teas are in the US, South Korea, Russia, and Japan, but he declined to reveal the number of shoppers or how much revenue it’s pulling in each year.

The startup’s newest funding round is led by JAFCO Asia, with seed buddies Accel Partners India joining in alongside newcomers Keystone Group and Dragoneer Investment Group.

See: India’s Premji and China’s Tencent back Cyanogen’s $80M funding

Building a brand

Dugar says Teabox is able to pick up steam because it has complete control over the customer experience – it partners with 200 tea growers across India and neighboring Nepal so that it can ensure quality and volume, and then gets the tea vacuum-packed and shipped out in about a week after it’s plucked from the bushes.

It’s competing not just with any other specialist tea estore out there, but will premium tea brands like Twinings. Its aim is to build a recognizable brand for Indian tea, bypassing the multinational companies that control much of the tea trade.

Dugar knows how the whole system works as his family has been in the tea trade for close to a century.