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Business News/ Companies / Hello Curry acquires technology company Fire42
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Hello Curry acquires technology company Fire42

The acquisition will give the Hyderabad-based food chain the technology backbone to expand to newer cities

Hello Curry handles 800-1,000 orders a day at its nine outlets in Hyderabad and Bengaluru, and promises delivery in 30 minutes.Premium
Hello Curry handles 800-1,000 orders a day at its nine outlets in Hyderabad and Bengaluru, and promises delivery in 30 minutes.

Hyderabad: Food start-up Hello Curry, which serves Indian cuisine in quick service restaurant (QSR) format, has acquired Fire42, a developer of cloud-based point of sale (PoS) systems. The acquisition will give the Hyderabad-based food chain required technology backbone as it expands to newer cities.

The companies did not disclose the size of the cash and stock transaction.

The technology component will help Hello Curry better compete against food delivery start-ups such as Food Panda and Tiny Owl that are aggressively wooing customers. Hello Curry handles 800-1,000 orders a day at its nine outlets in Hyderabad and Bengaluru, and promises delivery in 30 minutes.

Santosh Achari, founder and chief executive officer of Fire42, will move into a newly-created role as chief technology officer at Hello Curry, owned by Red Sprout Foods (P) Ltd.

“As Hello Curry is rapidly growing across India, having a good in-house technology team and tool-set is a must to support our expansion and adapt to new scenarios on the fly," said Raju Bhupati, chief executive officer of Hello Curry.

Fire42, which has handled 1 million orders over the last three years, will continue to service existing customers such as Marrybrown and South Africa-based food chains, Spur and Panarottis, but will not add new clients, Achari said. His 15-member team will focus on building back-end and customer-facing technology products for Hello Curry.

Hello Curry will build customer profiles and have solutions that display dynamic menus, and allow customers to track orders real-time. A vegetarian customer will first see a vegetarian menu. The software makes automatic note of customers’ preferences (those who do not prefer onions will not get it in their dishes).

Fire42’s analytic tools make it possible to monitor a kitchen’s performance or a restaurant’s sales with historical data and industry standards, enabling outlets to devise strategy, Achari explained.

Features such as these will come useful in differentiating itself as Hello Curry opens new outlets. The company is in discussions to take over kitchens of food chains in Delhi and Mumbai and expand geographically. It plans to enter Delhi in two months, Bhupati said.

Having an in-house technology team makes it easier to integrate different technology platforms for better customer experience and operational efficiency. “This is where technology platform really helps us," Bhupati said. “It becomes so seamless for us in terms of technology platform."

Going with commercial PoS systems makes it “very difficult to implement the changes that we need at the pace we expect", Bhupati explained. “So acquiring a strong technology company and then building unique features from the cumulative experience we have on top of the solid platform will provide us a definite edge."

Fire42’s team will also build on-demand ordering feature that automatically assigns food orders to delivery guys, reducing delivery time.

The 15-month-old company is backed by investor Sashi Reddi who has pumped in 6 crore in two tranches in seed funding. Hello Curry is also talking to venture capital firms to raise 50-60 crore.

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Published: 22 Jun 2015, 06:14 PM IST
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