Indian Food Innovation Intelligence Platform Spoonshot Raises $1M Seed Round from U.S. VC Firm

Bangalore-based Spoonshot, a company that leverages AI with food science to predict emerging food and beverage trends, Sept. 8 announced a seed investment of $1 million led by Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based VC firm SRI Capital.

“With the backing and expertise of our new investor, we're truly excited about this next phase for Spoonshot,” Kishan Vasani, Spoonshot co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. “Despite challenging global economic conditions, we've proved that our frontier technology and rich insights are invaluable to FMCG companies who still need to innovate but with increased agility and focus.”

The financing will be used to fuel Spoonshot’s growth plan and for further investment in its proprietary technology and team, according to a news release.

“The food industry is under tremendous pressure to innovate smarter than ever before as consumer demands become more sophisticated, especially amid the current economic and health crisis,” Doc Parghi, managing partner at SRI Capital, said in a statement. “Spoonshot solves this problem by providing deep intelligence at speed about consumer needs and lays out a product development roadmap at both a strategic and tactical level. We are delighted to back Kishan and Sai’s vision as they build the market leader in this emerging space.” 

Spoonshot has raised $1.8 million to date, including this round. Since publicly launching its product in October 2019, Spoonshot has signed a wide range of global food and beverage giants as well as category leaders across the U.S., U.K. and Australia, which are Spoonshot’s key markets. 

By processing billions of diverse data points spread across 12,000-plus sources in the domain of food, Spoonshot, which was backed by Techstars (Farm To Fork) in its pre-seed round, specifically focuses on long-tail data as a means of detecting stronger leading indicators of trends, the release said.

These data sources include food science research, food communities, niche e-commerce portals, media platforms, and data on millions of FMCG products, restaurant menus, and recipes, it said.

“By capturing food innovation in real-time we provide our customers with meaningful data so that they can understand emerging trends, identify competition, and create products that consumers want tomorrow,” added Vasani.