This ex-Flipkart employees’ startup is helping people tackle lifestyle diseases with nutritious food

Lifestyle diseases are one of the growing health concerns in India. According to a 2020 report by the Indian Journal of Community Medicine, India is currently facing the problem of the double burden of undernutrition and overnutrition. The report revealed that over 135 million people in the country are suffering from obesity.

Having battled PCOS and gall-bladder related issues personally, entrepreneur Snigdha Kumar was looking for healthier food options to manage her health and understood that there was a need to help people realise the importance of healthy diet food options.

In order to address this problem, former Flipkart colleagues Snigdha and Shrijit Venkatesh launched Cora Health in May 2020. Bengaluru-based health and wellness startup Cora Health offers an ecommerce platform that helps users get access to healthy food alternatives.

Prior to starting up, Snigha who completed her engineering from Nirma and MBA from MICA Ahmedabad, was heading the marketplace category of food, nutrition, and healthcare at Flipkart. Meanwhile, Shrijit, ISB Hyderabad and NIT Durgapur alumnus was heading Category Design and Operations for the largest business unit in Flipkart.

“Cora is building a unified platform where customers can discover nutritional products based on health conditions or health goals with guidance from a trusted community of health experts,” Snigdha tells YourStory.

She explains that people are still struggling to find information and guidance to help them make the right food choices. This is the core problem that Cora Health is looking to solve.

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Nutritious food alternatives to tackle lifestyle diseases

Cora Health provides healthy food alternatives across various categories including breakfast, beverages, chocolates, sweets, and bakery items, among others. It sources original products directly from popular brands across India.

Snigdha says that the startup currently sells over 1,000 products across 50 brands. “We also offer chat-based assisted buying to our customers through our in-house team of nutritionists and product experts to help people with product queries and insights,” she adds.

Apart from the ecommerce service, Cora is also looking to launch a content and guidance platform powered by its product and content recommendation engine, which delivers personalised insights.

“Our target audience are health-conscious individuals seeking foods that facilitate their health goals and help them find healthier alternatives. Customers are increasingly seeking healthier options and have a lack of clarity on the same. We are getting exceptional responses from both metro and non-metros as well,” she adds.

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Business and more

The co-founder explains the startup operates on a marketplace commission-based model.

While the startup declined to share details on the number of users or transactions, Snigdha claims that Cora Health is clocking 200 percent month-on-month growth. Its target revenue by the end of 2022 is Rs 100 crore ARR.

Cora Health is currently working with more than 10 courier partners to serve over 27,000 pin codes across India.

The co-founders launched Cora Health with an initial investment of Rs 20 lakh and also recently raised an undisclosed amount of funding in its pre-Seed round, which saw participation from Sanjay Mehta, Founder and Partner at 100X.VC; KRS Jamwal, Executive Director at Tata Industries; Amit Chaudhary, Founder of Lenskart; and Headstart Investor Circle.

While health consciousness was already rising among people, COVID-19 has further helped people realise the importance of staying fit and healthy in order to build a good immune system. Similar to Cora, Bengaluru-based Possible, backed by Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, also provides healthy food options and connects users with nutrition coaches to help people maintain a proper diet and live life disease-free.

Speaking about future plans, she reveals, “We are in advanced talks with a few investors to raise our seed round. The capital will be deployed in building core team, marketing and awareness, and technology stack for personalised insights.”