TapCibo emerges from stealth with funds to feed hungry Bangaloreans

A lot of people go hungry in India every day. The ones we’re talking about are busy city slickers who neither find the time to cook nor have the stomach for restaurant lunch. It’s not as serious an issue as those who starve from poverty, but it’s still a problem that all these workers eat in such an unhealthy way. These are the sorts of folks TapCibo wants to feed.

This Bangalore-based startup is promising to deliver fresh, tasty, and affordable ‘cibo’ – which means ‘food’ in Italian – in three taps on your Android mobile screen. Currently, this new service is available only in Indiranagar, Domlur, and around the Old Airport Road in Bangalore. But the reception so far – 70 percent of its customers returning – makes its co-founder Shashaank Shekhar Singhal optimistic about launching TapCibo in more locations very soon.

Singhal was heading the mobile products team at bus ticketing company RedBus, which was acquired by Ibibo in 2013. While working for RedBus in Bangalore he experienced the pain-point TapCibo is now trying to solve. He and his wife, like most young working couples, rarely found time to cook. They employed domestic help, “but she would be on leave often, and we would end up eating out. That’s neither healthy nor tasty nor economical, but we didn’t have an option,” Singhal says.

The Indian School of Business (ISB) Hyderabad alumnus started thinking about a way to solve this problem. Then in October 2014 he founded TapCibo along with technologist Monica Rastogi, who has over 10 years’ experience building technology products.

TapCibo revealed this week that it has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Alok Goel, CEO of one of India’s hottest startups, Freecharge. Goel was earlier COO at RedBus. Another connection is that he is married to Monica Rastogi.

Chefs on the roll

TapCibo has a slightly different model from other Bangalore-based food delivery startups. “We have our own chefs and reliable partners who prepare fresh and healthy food every day. We have dishes like dal makhni (a curry made with lentils), palak paneer (spinach cooked with Indian cottage cheese), and kadhi (a soup of chickpea flour and sour yogurt with fritters and vegetables floating in it). Users of our app can check the menu every day on their mobile phones, pick what they like, and get it delivered. The whole process takes just three taps,” Singhal says.

Spoonjoy, iTiffin, and SnaxSmart deliver healthy food too, but they have a subscription-based model. On TapCibo, you pay for only what you order, and not a monthly subscription. “Think of us as a curated food demand platform,” Singhal says. The curation sets it apart from sites like Foodpanda that connect users to restaurants, where it can be hard to find options that are fresh, healthy, and affordable daily.

TapCibo decided to go mobile-only because both Singhal and Rastogi are experts with years of experience building mobile products. “And also because the number of mobile users in India grew over 40 times in the last five years. In the next two years, mobile internet users are expected to grow even more exponentially,” Singhal says. “Startups like Flipkart, Freecharge, and RedBus in other verticals are seeing that the growth is much higher on their mobile platforms. Also, mobile gives you a lot of advantages in terms of personalization,” he adds.

Hot food, hot space

The food business is a hot sector for startups in India currently. Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal recently invested in Spoonjoy. iTiffin, SnaxSmart, and TinyOwl also raised funding recently. Trailblazer restaurant finder Zomato from Delhi is on a global trek, announcing one acquisition after another in new markets.