This Singapore angel loves his tea from India, and puts his money where his mouth is

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Cameron Jones, an angel investor in Singapore, has been enjoying the tea delivered to him in a box from India. He loves it so much that he has now invested in Teabox, the Indian startup that delivers tea to 94 countries from Darjeeling and Assam in the foothills of the Himalayas and the Nilgiri mountains in the south.

Connoisseurs the world over love the teas from these three hilly regions of India. It was the British who introduced tea plantations during colonial rule to break the Chinese monopoly on tea and meet the needs of a growing culture of breakfast and afternoon tea back home in England. It turned out that some of the teas grown in Darjeeling, on the slopes next to the world’s third highest mountain Kanchenjunga, were unmatched in flavor.

A disruptor of a traditional industry

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Tea is now a US$40 billion industry and one of India’s biggest exports, although two-thirds of Indian tea is consumed within the country itself. Indians love their morning cuppa too.

The four-year-old Teabox is a disruptor with digital tech and supply chain innovations to reduce shipping costs and reach more consumers spread around the world. It claims to have delivered tea leaves to make 35 million cups of tea to buyers in 94 countries.

One of them is Cameron Jones, managing director of Credit Suisse in Singapore, who had spent three years in India in an earlier stint. He became a Teabox customer late last year, and the experience prompted him to become an investor. Teabox did not disclose the amount of funding.

Texas oil baron’s love of tea

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Cameron is not the first tea lover to become an investor in Teabox. Texas oil baron Robert Bass, who finds coffee too bitter, found a provider of a more soothing beverage in Teabox. Then he participated in the Indian startup’s series A round of US$6 million last year, led by Accel Partners. Later, Indian biz tycoon, Ratan Tata, whose Tata Group has a tea brand, became an investor too.

Kaushal Dugar, whose family has been in the tea business for over 80 years, saw that the traditional warehousing and distribution of tea were both inefficient and ill-suited to preserve the freshness of tea that connoisseurs crave. Teabox has introduced modern vacuum packing and cold storages to source teas from 200 growers in India and Nepal and deliver them across the world.

And to think it all began by accident when the wind blew some leaves from a camellia sinensis plant into a pot of drinking water that a servant was boiling for Chinese emperor Shen Nung in 2737 BC. Legend has it this was the world’s first cup of tea.