Food ordering app TinyOwl, which launched its services in Hyderabad, Pune, Bangalore and Gurgaon in May, has now launched its services in Chennai. With this, the app is now available in 6 cities including Mumbai. According to TinyOwl, it will look it expand to a total of 50 cities by the end of this year.
In February, TinyOwl raised Rs 100 crore in a series B round of funding from Matrix Partners, Nexus Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital. Active only in Mumbai at that time, the company had said it would use the funds to expand to other cities. The platform had also raised $3 million in a series A round of funding from Nexus Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital earlier in last year.
Founded in 2014 by Harshvardhan Mandad and four other founders, TinyOwl‘s services allow customers to order food for delivery or takeout via its iOS and Android apps. It offers two products; ordering of food from nearby restaurants and ‘TinyOwl HomeMade’ for ordering food from local chefs. Payments for the platform can be made either through credit/debit card, payment portals like Paytm or cash on delivery. As of now, the platform claims to take around 3,000-5,000 orders everyday and cover over 4,500 restaurants.
Dishes feature: Last month, TinyOwl launched a new feature called ‘Dishes’ that let users order specific dishes or preset meals from certain restaurants, in a single tap. The new feature addresses a vital design problem with food ordering apps: people don’t know what to get and it is often tedious to go through menus. This feature eliminates the need for users to find a restaurant, go through menus etc. to find what they want, instead letting them order food of their choosing from a list of dishes from various restaurants.
Competition:
– Last month, restaurant directory service Zomato launched its food ordering app in Mumbai and Pune. The platform had said then that it would launch the service in Bangalore, Hyderabad and Kolkata as well, along with an app for Windows Phone in the future.
– In February, Rocket Internet-backed FoodPanda took over UK-headquartered JustEat’s India operations. This deal came three months after FoodPanda had acquired Delivery Hero-backed TastyKhana in November last year.
– The same month, Mumbai-based Holachef raised Rs 2 crore in seed funding from India Quotient. The platform had said then that it was looking to raise a further Rs 20-30 crore in the coming months.
– Former Times Internet CEO Rishi Khiani’s AntFarm had acquired the food delivery service Meals on Wheels for an undisclosed amount in November last year. The company then launched a redesigned version of Meals On Wheels website that allows users to search for their preferred restaurants, cuisines or dishes and place orders.
Update: TinyOwl informed us that they are not yet present in Delhi.
