Four month old startup Pocketin raises seed round funding of $150,000

Pocketin, a four-month old startup has raised its seed round of 150,000 USD from Hong Kong based Swastika Company Ltd and aims to consolidate the eating-out space in the national capital.

Pocketin provides a technology platform for diners to discover, compare, and choose where they want to head out next based on real time deals offered, events happening around the diner, or pertaining to specific activity the diner might have in mind (group packages, buffets, etc.).

It is the first ever platform in India which has given the restaurants the power to incentivize each diner differently depending upon the diner’s specifics and also the current business situation. Its revolutionary Autopilot technology, helps push curated deals to respective diners in the absence of the merchant on the platform. This way Pocketin ensures that the user gets the real time sourced deal from all the merchants within five minutes as a guarantee.

This seed round will be utilized to expand across Delhi, Noida, Ghaziabad and Gurgaon. It will also help in building the core team and strengthen the core product offering.

Pocketin was launched in September 2015 by Kshitij Mehra (DCE Alumnus), Anirudh Mondal (Thapar Alumnus, ex-Practo), Rahul Arora (DCE Alumnus), Siddharth Sharma (SIMC Alumnus, ex- Foxymoron) and Akshay Utreja. The venture was born out of weekly discussions on where to head next and the pain point of discovering better deals around them.

“We aim to create a platform which not only helps people discover new restaurants but also make their experience pocket friendly by offering them the best possible deals/discounts through our unique Real Time deal discovery and comparison engine. We also understand that for a diner, along with the price, convenience matters a lot which is why we have a dedicated operations workforce which ensures that every customer has a delightful and hassle free table reservation and deal redemption experience at the restaurant” says Kshitij Mehra, CEO at Pocketin.

According to Vaibhav Jain, Director at Swastika Company Limited, “Investing in Pocketin was an interesting proposition for us as we look to fund startups with a strong technical backbone. With the use of Real Time deal technology, they have empowered the restaurants to maximize their table occupancy and optimize profits. It’s a complete win-win situation for both the merchants and diners. This has been the reason that the platform has seen more than 75% repeat users at such an early stage”

“Our aim right now is to create a more intuitive experience for the user. The data points we are capturing on the platform is much more than what similar apps in the food-tech domain are able to capture because of the detailed interaction our app has with the user. This will help us to suggest the user more relevant restaurants and deals when he is looking for them without him having to make all that effort” says Anirudh Mondal, COO Pocketin.

Pocketin has grown organically in the last four months and mostly the growth has been driven by word-of-mouth referrals. With a very limited spend on marketing, the company has been able to drive more than 8000 downloads and seated more than 6500 diners. Pocketin aims to partner with more than 1200 restaurants in Delhi NCR in the next six months and seat more than 1 lakh diners. It has plans to expand operations to Mumbai, Bangalore and Dubai in the next phase. With a current team size of 15, Pocketin looks to double its team in the coming months.