Hyderabad-based food video commerce startup Sortizy has secured Seed funds from SucSEED Angels Network, Campus Fund, and other angel investors.
Sortizy is India’s first food video commerce platform that enables users to conveniently manage their everyday home cooking. Through video commerce users can discover right kitchen related brands and products and enjoy shopping while watching engaging short videos. Sortizy also offers a smart search engine and food-focused filters which recommend personalized recipes and cuts down the time it takes to find the right content. The platform is making cooking easier for anyone and with any level of cooking experience, by offering step-by-step smart recipe guides. Founded by four food enthusiasts Surbhi Guha, Sagthi Prakash, Akshay Gupta and Nitin Gupta in 2020, the start-up envisions to promote conscious decision-making around food and enable its users to sustainably manage their diets and nutrition at home.
Sortizy has over 150 content partners across India and 10 other nations. The platform enables them with an opportunity to publish their content in food focused formats, earn more from their efforts through multiple revenue sources and deliver more value to users across India, helping them easily eat the food of their choice.
Post the launch on Google Play Store in May 2021, over 3.6 lakh recipe explorations have happened and users have cooked for more than 1700 hours using the platform. The app has been awarded by Google Play as the Best app of 2021 in Everyday Essentials category.
Sagthi Prakash, the Founder of Sortizy said, “having faced the struggles of managing our home kitchens & diet due to busy lifestyles and lack of knowledge & skills, it motivated us to build a go-to platform for millions of Indian households where they can get more value from the content that they are already consuming and use it to eat the food of their choice easily at home.”
He further added that, “The pre-seed funding we raised from SucSEED, Campus Fund and such established Angel Investors will help us enhance our product and technology capabilities, strengthening our team and accelerate growth”.
Speaking on why they have invested, Vikrant Varshney Co-Founder & Managing Partner of SucSEED Angels Network, said “The total available market (TAM) for the Food Video Commerce category is $15B by 2025. The key growth drivers in this space include Indian social commerce, which is expected to reach $70B by 2030 (food category constitutes 8-10% of this). Online kitchen appliances market is growing with 37% CAGR to reach $1.2B by 2025. There are more than 200M urban millennials and older gen Zs to cater to in the space. The relationship of lifestyle and health is getting considered in the last few years and more so post pandemic. Sortizy re-imagines the way we approach diet & nutrition at home. It also caters to India’s first ever food focused & interactive short video content (called Yumms) to explore, discover, connect & learn everything about food and we wanted to participate in their journey.”
Deepthi Ravula, CEO, WE Hub, said ”Sortizy is a great example of how a student idea can be scaled, developed and reached to an accelerator stage by getting access to the right support at the right time. When the founders strive to put all the effort in, access to funds at the right time is always an added advantage. Sortizy has time and again proved itself by showing the right caliber by raising funds through Aha and SISFS through WE Hub. Glad that SucSEED is supporting them in the same mission, looking forward to see sortizy scale up and progress”
Sortizy has been incubated with IIT Hyderabad and WeHub and have received great support from them at regular interval.
Anirudh Toshniwal, Partner at Campus Fund said, “While people consume a lot of food and recipe content on social media and streaming platforms, none of them provide the user personalized catalog with ease of preparing the same. Sortizy users would be able to buy required groceries, utensils and get a step-by-step guide on how to prepare the recipe while scrolling through mouthwatering short-video content.”
About the company –
Sortizy is India’s first food video commerce platform that enables users to conveniently manage their everyday home cooking. Through video commerce users can discover right kitchen related brands and products and enjoy shopping while watching engaging short videos. Sortizy also offers a smart search engine and food-focused filters which recommend personalized recipes and cuts down the time it takes to find the right content.
Sortizy is empowering food content creators to earn more and helping brands to nurture their leads through food content marketing.
Problem(s) that Sortizy is addressing:
Food is a popular content category as the millennials & gen Z rely heavily on it for getting inspiration, making purchase decisions & learning. This dependency is increasing with exposure to new cuisine, diet, & ingredients, consciousness for sustainability & health, and lack of knowledge & skills.
Despite this popularity, the commerce and the value that users can get around food content is under-penetrated due to:
- Time taking discovery with scattered content
- Hassle-some purchase process
iii. Inconvenient cooking with non-uniform content
Due to this, content creators are only able to generate money through viewership and paid collaboration with brands that just creates awareness but hardly nurture leads.
Solution that Sortizy offers:
Sortizy is making food content more impactful for users, content creators, and brands.
- Users to make maximum use of food content and eat the food of their choice easily at home,
- Content creators to express their creation through dedicated content formats and generate more revenues
- Brands engage with their consumers meaningfully with content marketing
