Mumbai-based pizza chain Cheelizza has raised Rs 4.11 crore in seed round led by Indian Angel Network (IAN) investors Hari Balasubramanian, Uday Chatterjee, Deval Tibrewal, and Rajeev Sarda.
Co-investors Sagar Daryani, Founder of Wow! Momo, Karan Tanna, founder of Ghost Kitchens, and Rahul Surana who is principal at an international fund also participated in the round.
The chain has been running ten stores across Mumbai and Gujarat. With the new funds, it will focus on expanding its presence in Mumbai by opening 20 new stores in the next 12 months. It is also expanding its team and hiring talent across senior leadership roles in Business, Operations, HR, Marketing, along with 100+ team members for their frontline Store operations.
Started in 2013, Cheelizza is the brainchild of Animesh Lodha who left his job at Edelweiss to start this entrepreneurial journey. Commenting on the fundraise, he said, “We have been operating in stealth mode over the last 10 years focused on building the business on strong fundamentals. We have had a 10x revenue growth and have clocked 20%+ store level ebitda. We currently sell over 30k+ Pizzas per month with an over 50% repeat order rate. Cheelizza is the first step towards building a Portfolio of Pure Vegetarian Food brands offering an alternative choice to a large Vegetarian population.”
Hari Balasubramanian, Lead Investor at IAN said, “Cheelizza is uniquely positioned as a pure vegetarian brand and has a vision to become a global pure vegetarian food platform to serve customers across the globe. Animesh and his team are go getters and we are extremely confident that they would be able to build a portfolio of pure vegetarian food brands which will emerge as a category leader in the QSR space.”
Start your day, the smart way!
1 Mail | 2 Minutes | 3 Stories