Has Laundry Services Startup Tooler Closed Operations?

 

 

Pigeon Household Services Pvt Ltd, which operates Delhi-based on-demand laundry services startup Tooler, seems to have ceased operations.

The laundry services startup had earlier said it would resume operations after February 15, 2016 but till date there is no sign of it.

Tooler’s Facebook and Twitter  pages continue to say that the startup is undergoing renovation and will resume operations after 15 February 2016. The message reads:

The website, however, does not say anything on suspending or resuming operations.

Queries sent to the company did not elicit a response at the time of filing the report.

A YourStory report said it has closed down for good citing a text message from one of the founders.

Tooler was founded in June 2015 by Himanshu Arora, Vishal Gupta and Sukanth Srivastav and offers its services in Gurgaon, Delhi and Ghaziabad.

In November 2015, the startup raised an undisclosed amount in pre-Series A funding from CASHurDRIVE founder Raghu Khanna and former Paytm executive Samir Gupta.

The on-demand laundry services space has seen considerable activity in the past few months.

Earlier this month, Jaipur-based on-demand laundry startup Urban Dhobi Services Pvt Ltd raised an undisclosed amount of angel funding from Delhi-based serial investors Vinod Bansal and Sanjeev Singhal.

In December 2015, on-demand home cleaning and laundry startup SBricks acquired facility management services company Melway for an undisclosed amount.

In November 2015 on-demand laundry service platform Flashdoor raised an undisclosed amount in angel funding from former Flipkart executive Sujeet Kumar, Flipkart chief business officer Ankit Nagori and Traxcn Labs, while Wassup acquired express laundry service provider Chamak for an undisclosed amount.

UrbanClap Shuts Down Laundry Services

 

UrbanClap Technologies Pvt Ltd, one of the top two home services provider, has shut down its laundry services barely six months after launch, two sources close to the matter told DEALSTREETASIA.

Urbanclap, a mobile-only platform, provides services across 75 categories in Delhi NCR, Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai and Pune.

Till date, the Delhi-based company has raised almost $37 million in venture capital raising from Bessemer Venture Partners, Accel Partners and SAIF Partners. It also received an undisclosed amount from Tata Sons’ chairman emeritus Ratan Tata who backed the company last December in his personal capacity.

Earlier, the company offered a monthly-subscription for its laundry services but subsequently switched to day-to-day model around October 2015.

An UrbanClap’s spokesperson confirmed that the company had discontinued its laundry service but declined to offer further details. It is still providing dry cleaning services, according to its website.

The laundry service space has witnessed several vertical-focussed players joining fray in the fast-growing market. Urban Clap, on the other hand, is a horizontal player that straddles a wide range of on-demand home services. “As I understand, vertical players are better equipped to handle customer expectations as they are solely focused on one service compared to horizontal players,” said one of the source quoted above, who requested anonymity.

Also Read: India: On-demand home services co Housejoy strikes second deal in Feb, buys startup Orobind Fitness

Exclusive: India’s PickMyLaundry in ‘final talks’ to raise $1m from angel investors

Exclusive: On-demand Indian laundry startup Urban Dhobi raises seed funding

PickMyLaundry, a laundry-focussed startup that is also looking at raising an angel round, was one of the vendors for UrbanClap.

The market has also seen a few housing services players pivot to stick to the laundry niche.

For instance, Doormint, which launched in January 2015 offering on-demand electrician, plumber, carpenter, electronics appliance repair and pest control, now only provides laundry services. The startup is backed by Powai Lake Ventures, Helion Ventures and Kalaari Capital.

This space has also witnessed some consolidation play. Vertical service providers have, in some instances, also reported difficulty in getting funding compared to horizontal players. Mywash, which managed to get seed funding from Orios Venture, failed to attract VC investors.

In February this year, the startup was acquired by Amazon-backed Housejoy.

Hybrid laundry platform Wassup acquired Chamak for an undisclosed amount. Chamak is also backed by Kensington Capital, Index Advisory, Innosight Ventures, Calvert Investments and HNIs including Rajan Mariwala and Sandeep Tandon.

Around the same time, Zimmber bought hyperlocal marketplace Findyahan. Most recently, Housejoy acquired at-home personal fitness start-up Orobind Fitness Technologies.

The laundry services sub-segment, under the fast-growing on-demand home services space, has caught the eye of investors and has seen some deal activity too. Most recently, on-demand laundry startups PickMyLaundry and UrbanDhobi raised funding.

Snapdeal

 

First, watch this video:

 

Now watch these more recent ones.

 

 

 

“We work hard and party harder” – Snapdeal Employee. Spoke to soon.

Ola Shuts Food Delivery Business Ola Café

 

Exactly a year back, Ola launched it’s online food delivery business Ola Café and now it is no more. It seems Ola has shut down Ola Café as the tab does not appear anymore in their mobile app now.

Ola Café was not Ola’s main line of business – they had limited menu and delivered in very limited areas. On the other hand the competition had far more choices for the users. To scale up the operations for Ola Café, they needed to bring far more restaurants with comprehensive menu offerings and needed to cover far more areas.

To deliver food Ola used their partner drivers on the Ola Cab network, which seems to have not worked. Obviously, the cost of delivering food using a cab might have been much higher than a two-wheeler which is what is used by most food delivery boys.

Apart from this, Food-Tech space itself has been quite a difficult for startups. Even after 2-3 years of existence, most of them are burning huge amount of money. Funding has also dried up. Many smaller food-tech startups have already closed down and larger ones like Zomato and Tiny Owl have cut down their work force. This space is also seeing consolidation with smaller food-tech startups are getting acquired by bigger ones!

Now that funding has dried up, it makes sense for Ola to use the money more judiciously and focus on cab market, in which they are the market leader.

Micromax, Once A Rising Star, Struggles

 

 

A year ago, Micromax vaulted past Samsung Electronics Co Ltd to become India's leading smartphone brand. Today, its market share has nearly halved, several top executives have resigned, and the company is looking for growth outside India. 

In Micromax's slide to second place is a tale of the promise and peril of India's booming but hyper-competitive smartphone industry. 

India is the world's fastest-growing smartphone market. Shipments of smartphones jumped 29% to 103 million units last year. 

Rapid growth has helped nurture a crop of local brands, led by Micromax, that outsourced production to Chinese manufacturers. Now, as Samsung rolls out more affordable phones, the same Chinese factories are entering the Indian market with their own brands, depressing prices and forcing Indian mobile makers to rethink their strategies. 

"What the Indian brands did to the global brands two years ago, Chinese phone makers are doing the same to Indian brands now, and over the next year we see tremendous competition for Micromax and other Indian smartphone makers," said Tarun Pathak, analyst at Counterpoint Research in New Delhi. 

Management tensions

Micromax, which was founded in New Delhi by four partners in 2000 but only began selling mobile phones in 2008, built its market share by working with Chinese manufacturers such as Coolpad, Gionee and Oppo to offer affordable phones quickly. In 2015, it launched more than 40 new models. 

In 2014, the founders brought in outside managers to lead the company at a time when Micromax was challenging Samsung to become the largest mobile phone maker in India. 

But tensions arose soon after between founders and the newly hired executives, six former executives told Reuters. These conflicts undermined Micromax's attempts to raise funds for expansion, say former executives. 

Last May, Alibaba walked away from a mooted US$1.2bil (RM4.90bil) purchase of a 20% stake, citing a lack of clarity on growth plans, according to one executive involved in the discussion. Micromax co-founder Vikas Jain said in an interview with Reuters this week that the company and Alibaba disagreed on a future roadmap. 

Alibaba declined to comment. 

Former executives said the lack of fresh funding undermined a proposal by the new executives to move Micromax's research and design operations, which had previously been outsourced, in-house. The move was intended to help Micromax differentiate itself from generic Android clones. 

"We hired about 80-90 people in Bangalore to do in-house software and design, but with no money from the investors and little interest from the founders, that team fizzled away and that office has been partially shut down now," said a former executive. 

After Alibaba walked away, Micromax struggled to attract other investors who would have been key to Micromax's plan to invest in software R&D and hardware design. The company was forced to scale down the in-house R&D project, a top executive involved in the fundraising plan said. 

At least five senior executives have resigned since November. The latest was Vineet Taneja, chief executive since 2014, who quit last week. 

"The whole industry is suffering"

Meanwhile, Chinese handset makers, including Coolpad and Oppo, to which Micromax outsources its manufacturing, were sharpening their focus on India. Samsung, too, began to introduce more affordable models there. 

In 2015, Chinese brands doubled their market share to 18%, according to Counterpoint Research, taking away business from Indian budget phone makers such as Micromax, Intex, Lava and Karbonn. Indian brands' market share fell from 48 to 43% last year.  

"Right now the whole industry is suffering because of the Chinese phones," Jain told Reuters. "We have seen large write-downs happening on inventory in China, and that inventory is being passed on to India at a markdown." 

Chinese phone makers including LeEco, Xiaomi and Lenovo have also partnered with e-commerce companies including Amazon India and Flipkart to sell phones directly to consumers, saving on distribution and sales and reaching new online shoppers directly. 

In the final quarter of 2015, Micromax's shipments fell by 12.1%, against growth of 15.4% for the sector, according to industry tracker IDC. Micromax's share of the smartphone market fell to 13% in the fourth quarter from 22% at its peak in 2014, according to IDC. 

Micromax, which is privately held and does not disclose financial information, maintains it is profitable. Founders Jain, Rahul Sharma, Rajesh Agarwal and Sumeet Arora still control about 80% of the company. They have raised nearly US$90mil (RM367.99mil) from investors in the last five years. 

Facing competition from both Samsung and inexpensive Chinese phones, Micromax plans to increase production in India. Jain said that the company plans to double local manufacturing output from 1.5 million units to about 3 million units a month over the next six to 12 months. 

Already a top-10 brand in Russia, Micromax is seeking a partner to help it expand further outside India and diversify into televisions and tablets. 

"Micromax needs to diversify geographically and also needs to diversify product lines," said Neil Mawston, executive director of the global wireless practice at London-based research consultancy Strategy Analytics. How well it manages that diversification, Mawston says, will be key.

The Emerging And Disappearing Magical Food Tech Startups

 

2015 was widely touted to be the year of foodtech startups. TinyOwl is a case in point. Founded by 5 IIT Bombay graduates in 2014, it managed to garner 27 million USD in funds from Sequoia Capital, Matrix Partners and others, in just a few months. Snapdeal founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bhansal were among the early backers. But a few months later, things started to go wrong. The company tried to raise 50 million USD some time back. Discussion was on with South Africa’s Naspers and Food Panda. The talks failed, but they managed to get a lifeline of about 8 million USD from existing investors.
Nevertheless, by September 2015, they had let go of more than 200 employees. Harshvardhan Mandad, CEO and co-founder of TinyOwl, wrote in his blog post that the company had scaled back operational resources from 4 cities and would move to the e-sales platform to support customer needs.
Zomato, valued at nearly a billion dollars, has cut 300 jobs and shut its cashless payment in Dubai. The company had raised 220 million dollars from Temasek, Sequoia Capital and Info Edge.

To sum up the year 2015 in terms of investments and deals struck in the food tech sector: in April, it was 74 million USD, with a total of seven deals being struck. In August, this had dwindled to 19 million, with only five deals, and, by September, only a measly two deals had been struck. And Dazo had shut shop. More recently,Pepper Tap has closed operations in a few cities.
While there was initially a flurry of funding for online food tech startups, they are hard pressed to attract more funds to fuel their cash burning businesses. According to experts, this is a necessary and natural process of evolution, and, following the Darwinian theory, the fittest will survive.

And the key to survival will be the ability to bring about a consistent change in customer preferences. This could take a minimum of one generation, or ten years of push. This means that either you or your investors have deep enough pockets to tide over the rough and lean patches. And it doesn’t mean that you consistently churn out the same stuff. Foodies are a fickle lot. One has to have a real passion for the business, to constantly develop new tastes and change the presentation, in order to ensure repeat orders and to satisfy an increasingly consumerist society, eager for instant gratification in everything.
Among the other concerns in this business, the problem of plastic remains one of Himalayan proportions. Everything has to be disposable, as the joint family system has broken down and nuclear families with two wage-earners find it hard to train and retain domestic help. Unfortunately, the environment cannot dispose of plastic waste in the same time or ease with which we bundle it up in garbage bags. A few have tried using eco-friendly packing materials, but have had to give up because of escalating costs and possibilities of damage in transit.
What are the solutions for cash-strapped food tech startups? Merging with well-funded companies has always been an option. A case in point is Spoonjoy, which was “acqui-hired” by Grofers in recent times. Dealing in perishables will always be a risky proposition, as the margin for error is very narrow, and the tolerance is near zero. Only those who have the heart (and the stomach) for it will emerge victorious.

Recap 2015: Ten Startups That Lost Their Way

 

 

A bunch of Indian entrepreneurs discovered the rough side of the fancied startup life in 2015. While these ventures showed a lot of promise, they seem to have lost the plot for diverse reasons. Cost cutting became a central theme for ventures that were incessantly burning cash. A few unfortunate ones were compelled to shut shop. Internal clashes and unsuccessful pivots were the other major reasons for turmoil in 2015. Out of the 10 well-known startups that had a rough year, five were food-tech ventures. We take a look at ventures that had a forgettable 2015.

Localbanya
The online grocery delivery sector had its share of highs and lows this year.

Mumbai-based Localbanya, a three-year-old online supermarket backed by Shrem Strategies and Bennett, Coleman & Co Ltd’s Springboard Fund,stopped taking orders in October. Localbanya asked 40 per cent of its employees to leave as it prepared to pivot from being an inventory-led, warehousing-centric model to an online marketplace for groceries. At that time, company officials claimed that the startup would soon make a comeback.

However, there has not been any update on this front.

“We are under renovation. We will be back shortly,” a message on the websites reads.

Karan Mehrotra had founded the venture with Rashi Choudhary and Amit Naik in 2012.

TinyOwl
The hostage crisis at food ordering startup TinyOwl was probably the most unexpected episode of the year. On November 2, Mumbai-based TinyOwl said it was laying off 112 employees, as part of measures to make the business viable. In September, it had sacked about 100 staffers.

A day later, TinyOwl co-founders Harshvardhan Mandad, Saurabh Goyal, Shikhar Paliwal, Tanuj Khandelwal and Gaurav Choudhary travelled to Chennai, Pune, Hyderabad and Delhi offices. Their message to employees was: Take post-dated cheques and agree to quit work. However, employees in Pune demanded full and final settlement. They claimed to have lost trust in the company’s top management. Co-founder Choudhary and a colleague were held hostage at TinyOwl’s Pune office by about 30 irate staffers who had been sacked. Many were incensed as the layoffs were announced a few days after TinyOwl raised $7.5 million (Rs 50 crore) in fresh funding from existing investors Sequoia Capital and Matrix Partners.

It’s CEO, Mandad, said on November 4 that the situation had been resolved. “We have had a long day in resolving a critical situation in Pune wherein two of our employees had been made to stay back in office for over 48 hours. We have been able to resolve this and have immediately started working on considering the demands beyond the terms of employment, placed forward by other employees from other cities,” Mandad said.

Talentpad/Trevo/ Zobtree
Is serial entrepreneurship linked with serial failure? Mayank Jain and Raghav Jain have burnt their fingers thrice.

First, they founded and closed social referral startup Zobtree. Last year, they joined hands with Nikhil Vij to form TalentPad.com (formerly known as Talent Auction), a Bangalore-based curated marketplace for technology recruitment. The trio managed to raise funding from Helion Venture Partners. However, by the middle of 2015 it closed down.

“One of the things that our entire team has been passionate about is making a big impact to a wide-ranging audience. We could not figure out a way to achieve that,” the company said in its final blog post in August.

In October, the same bunch of entrepreneurs ventured into the bus pooling space with Trevo, an app that aggregated tourist and chartered buses in Gurgaon and Delhi NCR. Within a month, Trevo too ran out of steam. Industry insiders say that Trevo shut down due to its inability to raise fresh funding. The company was reportedly scouting for Series A funding of up to $10 million.

Eatlo
Bangalore-based Eatlo is another food-tech venture which ran out of cash. The company, which was founded by Rahul Harkisanka and Sai Priya Mahajan in November 2014, sourced meals from chefs and enabled delivery in select areas of Bangalore.

The chinks in Eatlo’s armoury were showing since early December when it stopped accepting orders. The company unsuccessfully tried to raise Series A funding of $7-8 million. A few weeks later, Eatlo confirmed its decision to pull the plug.

In fact, the startup closed its operations just five months after raising funding from Powai Lake Ventures, Abhishek Goyal of Tracxn Labs and equity crowdfunding platform Globevestor.

“We have temporarily closed our operations and we are re-evaluating things. We are a startup and a lot of things keep changing. We will update once we decide,” Harkisanka told Techcircle.in.

Dazo
Food ordering startup Dazo, which started life as Tapcibo, had barely completed a year before it shut shopin early October.

The venture - founded by ex-Redbus executive Shashaank Shekhar Singhal and Explore-in-Android founder Monica Rastogi - had an illustrious set of backers. It counted CommonFloor co-founder and CEO Sumit Jain, TaxiForSure co-founder Aprameya Radhakrishna, Yo! China co-founder Ashish Dev Kapur and Amazon India country manager Amit Agarwal, besides Google India MD Rajan Anandan, as investors.

Dazo’s decision to wind up operations reflected the challenges facing the food-tech sector - wafer-thin or no margins, high cash burn owing to uncalled-for marketing and low entry barriers for new players.

“As a team we’ve decided to move over this business and we’ll be working on a new product,” the company said in October.

Spoonjoy
Food delivery app SpoonJoy was another casualty of waning investor interest in the food-tech space. The SAIF Partners-backed SpoonJoy was acqui-hired by hyper-local grocery and fresh food delivery platform Grofers in October, after the cash-strapped venture ran out of cash.

The two-year-old SpoonJoy, which counted Flipkart CEO Sachin Bansal and Delhivery co-founder Sahil Barua as backers, was a subscription-based online platform for users to order meal packs.

Though the acquisition ensured that Spoonjoy did not fade into oblivion, its acquirer Grofers has no plans to continue the food-tech business. Grofers CEO Albinder Dhindsa said that his interest lay in leveraging the experience of the Spoonjoy team.

AdMagnet
Sequoia-funded advertising network AdMagnet suspended its operations in October, a few months after its co-founder Ratish Nair left the company because of health problems. AdMagnet was founded by Nair and Sunil Miranda in 2008. It was spun off from Interactive Avenues, a digital marketing agency, co-founded by Nair.

In its heyday, AdMagnet enabled brands to reach 19.79 million unique visitors or 51 per cent of India's internet population.

DoneByNone
Seedfund-backed DoneByNone was one of the earliest causalities in the e-commerce space this year. The private label women fashion etailer went inactive in January.

The company was founded by Amarinder Dhaliwal and Vijesh Sharma in February 2011. Vijay Misra joined hands with the duo later. For two years, the company ran operations under the HandsPick.com brand, before changing it to DoneByNone in 2013. While the founders did not specify why the company closed operations, the inability to secure fresh funding was seen as the primary reason.

Dhaliwal quit the company to join handset manufacturer Micromax as the chief operating officer of its new sub-brand ‘YU’.

Housing.com
Housing.com could easily go down as the most Googled Indian startup of 2015, thanks to its maverick former CEO Rahul Yadav’s headline hitting ways.

Be it Yadav’s email spat with Sequoia Capital’s managing director Shailendra Singh, his infamous run-in with Housing.com investors or the bizarre decision to gift his entire stake to the company’s employees, Yadav never ceased to surprise. He attracted a legal notice for accusing the Times Group of deliberately maligning Housing.com. In a caustic resignation letter to investors, much before he was sacked, Yadav termed Housing.com’s investors as ‘intellectually incapable’. The open feud finally reached its climax in July when the company board sacked him.

Under Yadav, Housing.com had spent Rs 120 crore on advertising, marketing and other business development activities. Soon after Yadav’s ouster, the company shut down unprofitable units and brought in new senior executives. In all, about 800 jobs were cut in multiple rounds. After operating without a full-time CEO for three months, Housing.com appointed its chief business officer Jason Kothari as CEO.

Housing.com, which has so far raised around $120 million from investors, is in talks for fresh funding from existing investors led by Japan’s SoftBank. Housing.com competes with PropTiger in which News Corp, the parent of this news website, owns a 30 per cent stake.

Langhar
Delhi-based Langhar was the first food-tech venture to shut shop this year.

The company was founded in 2013 by Karanpreet Singh, Pankaj Sharma, Sunil Kumar and Pawan Saini and had secured $1,50,000 from ARK Challenge and $20,000 from Times Internet incubator TLabs. Langhar was a community marketplace that served fresh homemade meals by connecting housewives, hobbyists and professional cooks.