BetterButter, an online social, food discovery platform, has raised a seed funding round led by growx ventures. The platform currently focuses on recipes, allowing users to create, share, discover, and appreciate recipes, and aims to become the de-facto platform for all things kitchen in the future.
BetterButter was founded by Sukhmani Bedi and Niyaz Laiq, graduates of Cambridge, Insead, and SOAS. Sukhmani’s experience spans IMF, Deloitte, and Phillips, where she led marketing for kitchen appliances. Niyaz comes from the VC/ PE industry, and has worked at Hermes PE in London/ Singapore and Lok Capital in Delhi.
Recipes have emerged as a major category of engagement for Indians online. Food & Beverages is the second-most searched category by Indian women, with recipes topping search within F&B. India is also the world's largest consumer of recipe content on YouTube. Up until now, however, the recipe space in India has remained fragmented across a variety of blogs, Facebook groups and YouTube channels. BetterButter intends to change that by becoming the home for recipes in India.
Commenting on the fund raise, the company's founders said, “Cooking plays a central role in Indian homes; in fact, Indians spend the maximum amount of time in their kitchens as compared to any other country in the world. Despite this, there is no large recipe brand in the country today, and our goal is to make BetterButter synonymous with cooking at home in India. We are delighted to have great investors who share this vision with us. “
The recipe space, largely unaddressed in India, has seen significant global deal activity in recent times. Last month, Xiachufang raised a Series B round of $30m and in November 2015, Douguo secured a $25m Series C funding round. Douguo has seen over 75 million downloads of its mobile app. Markets like the United States and Japan have multiple established recipe discovery platforms.
Speaking about the investment, Ashish Taneja, Managing Director at growx ventures, said, “Indians are voracious consumers of recipes on the Internet, and we believe that there is potential to create a new kind of food and kitchen-centric platform in India with tens of millions of monthly, highly-engaged users. Niyaz and Sukhmani have the right vision, and skills, to make this happen.”
Apart from growx, Singapore-based investment firm M&Y Growth Partners and angel investor Manish Singhal participated in the round. Manish will also take on a Board Observer role in BetterButter.
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