Startup Circle: How Ripsey grew 5x in the last financial year?

Ripsey is people’s health goal partner, nutritionist, chef, and more on their journey to become, and remain, as healthy as possible. It is built on a deep tech platform that is driven by data gathered from consumer’s insights and profiles.

Founded in April 2018 by Silky Singh, Ripsey designs meal plans that help people meet their health goals such as losing fat, gaining muscle, or staying fit.

Ripsey is transforming health through delectable and nutritious meals and grow into a $1 billion brand. The deep tech platform has the expertise that grants insights into individual nutritional needs.

How did you come up with the idea?

Ripsey, formerly known as Fresh Food Co. was incorporated by Ms. Silky Singh in 2018 and was based out of Colaba at the time. The idea behind the brand is the confusion relating to eating healthy, for example, Ghee once was bad, now it is regarded as healthy, Olive Oil is touted as the healthy oil, digestive biscuits being marketed as high fibre but seems to not mention the high sugars that they are loaded with!

There are many consumers whose notion of eating healthy is limited to soups and salad which is not easy to carry out that routine for a long time. People who cannot afford to hire a nutritionist would have a meal plan but with the limited time and skills they have, it is very inconvenient to eat accordingly.

While going with the idea, the founder interacted with her known ones, who were facing similar problems and this led to the formation of Fresh Food Co. For over a year, Ms Singh ran a prototype, to understand the product-market fit, launched a subscription to study the consumer behaviour, introduced new recipes to see how the fit works, understood the pricing models and in August 2019 she rebranded the company and launched Ripsey.

How does your platform work?

Ripsey is a one-stop solution for eating healthy. The company’s ace team of nutritionists plan the food, in-house kitchen team cooks the food to the specifications, own delivery personnel delivers the food to the consumer’s doorstep and the nutritionists also track the consumer’s progress in achieving their health goals.

What were the challenges and how did you overcome them?

Forming a competent team was one of the toughest challenges we faced. The skilled labour especially cooks and utilities have a very limited skill set. For the kind of innovation, we were envisioning it was difficult for the team to execute. Alongside the side of the team, acquiring licenses was an uphill battle and required a lot of time and effort and of course money!

In the end, we had a lot of help from several people to help us manoeuvre through the challenges.

What has been your business growth till now?

We grew 5x in the last financial year

What is the one thing that sets you apart from your competitors?

We are a deep tech platform with a full-stack solution. A combination which does not exist in the market

Funding

The company has raised a seed fund from two angel investors in the of 2018, post which the brand Ripsey was launched. Ripsey is currently fundraising for a bridge round, post which the company has a plan to raise a series A, in the second half of 2020.

Future plans

At present the company source its raw material from the wholesalers in Mumbai market, but has plans to go direct to the farmers, bringing in the “farm-to-fork” USP to its brand. This will also help the company to go the way of clean labelling, another USP that the company is working on it.

Ripsey has its own cloud kitchen setup with one central kitchen and two delivery kitchens in Mumbai. There are plans to expand to other metros - Delhi NCR, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune.

Ms. Silky Singh, CEO & CTO, Ripsey

Silky Singh earned an undergraduate degree in computer science from Manipal Institute Technology following which she worked in the technology space with Schneider Electric and Accenture. She played an extensive role in the product and technology domain at Schneider where an idea originating from her about redesigning hardware led to the granting of a valuable patent.

After numerous other successes at Schneider, she joined the Government of Oman’s Salalah Free Zone project where she was in charge of attracting FDI from India to Oman. In 2016, Silky exited the corporate arena to form her first start-up called WarehousesAndMore to serve the logistics sector.

In April 2018, she formed Fresh Food co. envisioning it as a prototype before committing wholly to a venture in the technology arena. She expected to use Fresh Food co. as a platform that helped understand customers and gather insights into their behaviour, and in August 2019 she rebranded the company and launched Ripsey.