To help consumers shop online for Indian and South Asian foods from local businesses, Chicago startup Quicklly raised its first round of funding.
The startup, founded in 2017 by Keval Raj, raised $1.27 million in a pre-seed funding round from a group of individual and angel investors. The group includes Founder and CEO of Home Chef Pat Vihtelic; Peapod Co-Founder and former CIO John A. Furton; Farmer's Fridge Executive and former Peapod CMO Mike Brennan; Executive Chairman and Co-founder of Shiftgig Eddie Lou; John Cerasani of Glencrest Global (Cerasani Family Office); Fabletics and JustFab owners Adam Goldenberg and Don Ressler; and Senior Vice President of Operations at Foxtrot and Former General Manager of Instacart Scott Holloway.
Quicklly’s website is a marketplace for mom-and-pop shops that sell Indian and South Asian foods. Shoppers can buy groceries, tiffin carriers and fully prepared meals for same-day delivery. And Quicklly allows customers to consolidate orders from several grocers and restaurants into a single delivery.
Using artificial intelligence, Quicklly helps vendors determine the most popular items and tailor their offerings to current demand. The startup charges vendors a fee for every purchase made on the platform.
The startup said its business quadrupled in 2020, partly due to the pandemic increasing demand for online grocery shopping. Quicklly’s service is currently live in Chicago and the Bay Area, but the company said it plans to use the funding to expand to more cities, such as New York and New Jersey. The platform has nearly 100 small businesses on its platform.
“We created Quicklly to give these businesses the technological resources to compete against the larger players by building their digital storefronts, expanding their consumer base, and scaling their digital capabilities with a significantly lower fee structure,” Raj said in a statement.
