Mukunda Foods: A young team in pursuit of automating Indian food retail segment, first with dosas

Indian Angel Network, India’s first and Asia’s largest angel network today announced its investment in Mukunda Foods. The start-up is into design and development of automated food equipment for use in the Indian food retail segment. Their first product is Dosamatic: A tabletop dosa making machine. Mukunda Foods is also an IAN incubatee company, which has graduated from the IAN Incubator and raised investment.

Eshwar K. Vikas and Sudeep Sabat were studying at the SRM University in Chennai, where they were active in entrepreneurial activities from early days. In May 2012, both founded a company called Mukunda Foods to develop products to automate Indian food. They started working on an idea they had for an automatic dosa maker. They pitched their idea to Indian Angel Network where they were selected for the incubator which helped them refine the product.

The company graduated from the incubator and to fuel their growth, IAN has invested in Mukunda Foods. This round of investment was led by IAN investors Hari Balasubramaniam and P Gopinath. During incubation, Sudarshan Lodha joined Mukunda Foods as the Director of Sales & Marketing and the total team strength stands at 5 as of now. Mukunda Foods aims to automate food making and the first product is called DosaMatic - an automatic tabletop dosa making machine that delivers fresh, untouched dosas in a minute’s time at the press of a button. This product intends to change food service industry, by eliminating manual labor and bringing in standardisation to Indian Foods. Mukunda Foods also holds the patent for this product and they’ve priced it around Rs 50,000 at the moment.

“We take a lot of care to design the equipment to international safety standards to have a unique experience,” says Eshwar. Ideated internally, the manufacturing of the product is outsourced at the moment and assembly again happens in-house. The funds raised will be used to develop DosaMatic, establish it as a brand, streamline the manufacturing and create robust sales and service channels. Hari Balasubramaniam has joined the board. He says, “Mukunda Foods addresses a relevant problem faced in the food retail industry. The food industry is an ever-growing and dynamic industry that is open to innovation to help reduce production costs. Innovations and evolutionary equipment like that by Mukunda Foods would surely make an entry in to the marketing budgets of food retailers.”

Mukunda Foods exists in an interesting space and something which isn’t written about a lot in the startup media but they solve a very relevant problem. They’ll be entering the space via businesses and it’ll be interesting to see how their growth curve pans out.

Website: Mukunda Foods