Spring Leaf Retail owned Mast Kalandar, a north Indian vegetarian food chain, has raised $6 million from Helion Venture Partners and Footprint Ventures, in its third round of funding.
The current tranche of funds will be used to scale up to 100 outlets across eight cities in the next 18 months.
Guarav Jain, chief executive officer, Mast Kalandar said, “This round of funding will help us achieve some remarkable milestones in the coming months and help us to reach out to more customers.”
Mast Kalandar now has 40 outlets in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai and Pune and serves two lakh customers every month. It has over 550 employees.
Kanwaljit Singh, senior managing director, Helion Advisors said, “The QSR space in India faces challenges such as long gestation periods, rising real estate costs and complexity of logistics and back-end operations. Moreover, Indian food, unlike certain western cuisines, does not lend itself readily to the assembly-line production model. In this scenario, Mast Kalandar has been exceptional in getting the delivery model right and scaling to 40 outlets.”
Established in 2005, Mast Kalandar is a brand owned by Spring Leaf Retail, the entrepreneurial venture of Gaurav Jain and Pallavi Gupta. The previous two funding rounds saw the participation of Helion and Footprint Ventures, alongside angel investors, the Salarpuria group.
In 2008, Footprint Ventures had invested in the Series A round of funding of Spring Leaf. In 2010, both the PE firms Helion and Footprint Ventures along with Salarpuria Group, an angel investor, invested in Series B round in Mast Kalandar. With this investment, the total funds raised by Mast Kalandar goes up to $11 million.
The organised eating out market in India is pegged at Rs 8,000 crore and QSRs are witnessing the fastest annual growth of nearly 25 per cent. Key reasons for this growth include a increase in nuclear families and the soaring urban migrant population.
The QSR segment witnessed many investments this year.
Indian Angel Network invested an undisclosed amount in Mexican quick service restaurant Poncho in Mumbai. SAIF Partners invested Rs 40 crore in TMA Hospitality Services owned Ammi's Biryani. In July, Correa Hospitality invested $5 million in QSR chain Fishtro for an undisclosed stake.
(Edited by Prem Udayabhanu)
