About 1.5 crore people in India travel in a long distance trains each day. Managing food during travel is always a challenge. Especially when you are travelling with family. Travelkhana, an online portal that allows travellers on trains to order their favourite food, delivers your favorite food at your seat! Travelkhana works with partner restaurants in selected cities to deliver food to passengers requested by them through their website or through their phone (passengers can order via sms as well).
Approximately 8 billion people in India travel in a train every year, about 500 million of whom belong to the sleeper and AC class passengers. Travelkhana particularly focuses on addressing needs of this category of passengers who seek a specific quality and lots of variety in their food. Travelkhana is one of the first companies to venture into this space and is almost responsible for creating this industry. The company currently offers service in 130 cities with partnerships with some of the best restaurants in the country and currently has a team size of 60.
Travelkhana was started by Mr. Pushpinder Singh. Prior to starting Travelkhana, Mr Singh was the V.P Technology CTO for INCA Informatics Creation . He has been instrumental in creating and taking to market multiple products of repute at Quark, ARI Labs and Aplion Networks. He graduated with a Masters in Science Degree in Computer Science from BITS- Pilani and B.Tech from IIT-BHU.
Technology is at the core of this company’s operations philosophy. “Realizing that Technology does not play any significant role in making a passenger’s travel comfortable I ventured on to create Travelkhana which is a platform for travelers to use to buy food – a much needed and underserved segment.” says Mr Singh. He has also made sure that technology is embedded in every part of operations of the company. As a part of its technology focus, Travelkhana has built its proprietary order-to-fulfillment product which enables them to track the movement of train in real time. The system is fully automated from the point of ordering to delivery, customer feedback and reconciliation. The company also works on a number of other technology initiatives such as predictive analytics etc which allows Travelkhana to remain at the top of their game.
The company is now working towards becoming a one place platform for people to get their services during travel. They plan to map out every single station in India and to include small kiosks and joints to their network in the coming months. Travelkhana is planning to raise investment in the near future and has already started the process with a few reputed venture funds. They are on track to raise the next round of funds.
