Startup Deep Dive : Daalchini — from a 2020 lockdown wipeout to its first profit in FY25

Vending machines feel like a low-margin relic of the coin-slot era, not something a “smart retail” startup would bet a company on. Yet in the year ending March 2025, Daalchini Technologies turned that bet into its first-ever net profit — ₹2.5 crore on ₹70 crore (about $7.3 million) of revenue, up 88.7% year on year, as per its regulatory filings reported by Inc42 in October 2025.

Founded in Noida in 2017 by two former Paytm employees, Daalchini almost did not make it past its third year: the one customer type its entire kiosk network depended on — the corporate office — shut its doors overnight in March 2020. What happened between that near-death moment and this year’s profit, and where the money actually comes from, is the rest of this piece.

Quick facts

What they do

Daalchini builds and places temperature-controlled, IoT-connected vending machines — the company calls them “micro-marts” — that dispense fresh meals, snacks and beverages in places where people spend long stretches of the day: corporate offices, factories, hospitals, colleges, co-living spaces and hotels. Each machine is stocked by dozens of food and beverage brands rather than by Daalchini alone, so a single unit might carry a cloud kitchen’s curry bowls next to a snack brand’s chips and a dairy company’s flavoured milk. Customers pay through a QR code and app rather than cash, and the company’s pitch to landlords and HR teams is simple: replace an unreliable in-house cafeteria or a canteen contractor with a self-service kiosk that restocks itself based on sales data.

The origin

Prerna Kalra grew up in Meerut, in a family that ran a small shop, before an engineering degree in Chandigarh and an MBA from IMT Ghaziabad took her into corporate India. She spent roughly seven years at Paytm, rising to head of the Paytm Wallet product, and it was there — juggling a demanding product role with almost no time to cook — that she began noticing how badly Indian workplaces served their own employees’ hunger. Food delivery was too slow and too expensive to repeat six times a day; the office pantry was neither fresh nor healthy. The specific spark came on a work trip to China, where she saw vending machines dispensing not just chips and soft drinks but fruit, sandwiches and momos. She returned convinced the same idea, adapted for Indian food habits, could work at home.

She co-founded Daalchini with Vidya Bhushan, an IIM Ahmedabad and IIT Kharagpur alumnus with about seven years in IT and payments, after leaving Paytm. The company was incorporated in August 2017, and the two spent the next several months building a first working prototype with a small group of engineer friends in a rented flat before taking it to investors — who largely turned them down until the founders secured their first outside backing in 2019.

The struggle years

The early years were a slow, unglamorous climb before they were anything else. Daalchini grew its kiosk count from about 2 machines in its first year to 50 by the end of FY19, then to roughly 200 by the end of FY20 — a network built almost entirely around one customer type: the corporate office. That concentration became the company’s biggest vulnerability. By March 2020, with turnover having reached about ₹5 crore, Daalchini was a business that lived or died by whether people came into work.

They stopped coming. The COVID-19 lockdowns that began in late March 2020 shut down the offices, co-working spaces and campuses that hosted almost all of Daalchini’s machines, and orders collapsed along with footfall. For a company that had only just found its footing, a nationwide shutdown of its entire addressable customer base was close to an extinction event, not a routine down quarter.

The turning point

The founders’ response was to change who the machines served rather than wait for offices to reopen. As per company accounts reported by Adgully in December 2023, Daalchini’s placements before the pandemic were about 77% concentrated in corporate offices; the pivot pushed the network into hospitals, manufacturing and pharmaceutical plants, in-transit locations such as cabs and buses, and residential complexes — categories that, unlike offices, kept operating through the lockdowns. One of the first moves was placing machines inside a manufacturing plant in Greater Noida during the first wave, a bet that factories would keep running even when white-collar offices could not.

The company also rebuilt the buying experience for a public suddenly afraid to touch shared surfaces: a contactless, QR-code-based purchase flow with a foot-operated pedal to release the product, rolled out as offices began reopening at partial capacity through mid-to-late 2020. Within about four months of launch, contactless pickups accounted for roughly 37% of app transactions. The combined effect — new customer segments plus a purchase flow that fit a hygiene-conscious moment — is what carried Daalchini’s kiosk count past its pre-pandemic base rather than merely back to it, setting up the multi-year expansion that followed.

The money behind it

Daalchini’s capital history is small by Indian startup standards and mostly recent — the founders bootstrapped the company through its first year before raising any institutional money.

• 2018: Bootstrapped by Prerna Kalra and Vidya Bhushan following the 2017 incorporation (Adgully, December 2023).
• 2019: First outside investor secured after a run of rejections, per company accounts — the seed capital that funded the initial kiosk rollout.
• September 2022 — Series A, $4 million: Led by Unicorn India Ventures, with participation from Artha Venture Fund, former Domino’s India CEO Ajay Kaul, and VSS Investco, the investment vehicle of Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma. Reported at the time as the largest single round raised by an Indian smart-vending company (TechCrunch, September 2022; India Infoline, September 2022).
• 2024–25 round, about $3.6 million: A mix of equity and debt from existing backers Unicorn India Ventures and Artha Venture Fund, joined by ICICI Securities, taking cumulative funding to a reported $8.8 million (Inc42, October 2025).

Total funding is one of the few contested figures in Daalchini’s public record: Inc42 puts cumulative funding at roughly $8.8 million including the debt component of the latest round, while Crunchbase’s independently tracked equity rounds add up to about $6.73 million — the gap is most likely the debt financing that equity-only trackers do not count. Daalchini has not disclosed a valuation at any round, and none of the sources reviewed for this piece report one.

How it makes money

Daalchini’s revenue is not just “sell snacks through a machine” — it is a three-part model layered on top of a physical network that it increasingly does not own outright.

• Product margin: roughly 40% of topline comes from the markup on food and beverages sold through the machines, with the company citing gross margins in the 12–45% range depending on the product category (company data via CXO Digital Pulse and Mountain Echo, 2024–25 reporting).
• Machine rental / subscription: another roughly 40% of revenue comes from monthly fees — reported in the range of ₹5,000 to ₹15,000 per machine — charged to the offices, factories and institutions that host a unit rather than own it.
• Advertising and brand listing: the remaining roughly 20% splits between listing fees brands pay to feature products in the machine’s assortment (about 5%) and advertising sold on the machine’s digital screen and Daalchini’s app (about 15%).

The part people get wrong is assuming Daalchini owns and operates most of its own machines. As per Mountain Echo’s 2024–25 reporting, roughly 95% of the fleet now runs on a franchise model, where an individual or small operator buys the machine — the company has cited a franchise entry cost starting near ₹1.5 lakh plus a nominal fee — and runs it locally, with Daalchini supplying the technology stack, the supply chain and the brand relationships. That shift converts what looks like a capital-heavy hardware business into something closer to a software-and-supply-chain layer sitting on top of other people’s capital, which is also why the company can talk about doubling its machine count in a year without a matching jump in its own balance sheet.

The numbers

Figures below are consolidated, as reported by Inc42 from Daalchini’s regulatory filings (November 2024 and October 2025 reporting); unit is ₹ crore.

• FY22 revenue was about ₹12 crore on a standalone basis, per CXO Digital Pulse’s November 2024 reporting of Daalchini’s filings — the starting point for the 3.5x growth the company has cited between FY22 and FY24.
• A separate standalone-basis filing (as opposed to consolidated) put FY24 operating revenue at ₹18.3 crore, up 56% from ₹11.7 crore in FY23, and standalone net loss at ₹9 crore, down 32% from FY23 (Inc42, November 2024) — the difference from the consolidated numbers above reflects Daalchini’s subsidiary structure rather than a discrepancy in the underlying business.
• Machine count roughly doubled from 1,600 at the end of FY24 to 3,400 at the end of FY25, with a target of 6,700 by the end of FY26 (Inc42, October 2025).
• Daalchini has claimed a further 2x year-on-year jump in FY26 revenue to about ₹140 crore as of April 2026 — a company-stated, not yet independently filed, figure.

Where the money comes from

Two shifts explain most of Daalchini’s growth since the pandemic: where its machines sit, and who owns them.

• Segment mix: corporate offices, once roughly 77% of placements pre-pandemic, now share space with hospitals, manufacturing and pharmaceutical plants, transit locations and residential complexes — a deliberate diversification that began as a COVID survival measure (Adgully, December 2023).
• Ownership mix: about 95% of the machine fleet is now run under the franchise model rather than owned and operated directly by Daalchini, up from a company that started as a pure operator (Mountain Echo, 2024–25 reporting).
• Geography: the network has grown from fewer than 200 outlets pre-pandemic to more than 2,600 outlets across 80-plus cities as of late-2024/2025 reporting, with expansion increasingly aimed at Tier II and Tier III towns rather than the metro-only footprint of the early years (Mountain Echo, 2024–25 reporting; CXO Digital Pulse, November 2024).
• The surprise: the biggest single swing factor in profitability was not selling more snacks — it was collecting rent and franchise fees on machines Daalchini no longer has to buy itself, which is why revenue could grow 88.7% in FY25 while the company’s own capital intensity did not rise in step.

The risks

• Thin, perishable-goods margins under cost pressure: standalone total expenses grew 36% in FY24, faster than the 56% standalone revenue growth in the same year mostly slowed, with procurement costs up 10% and other operating expenses up 56% — a reminder that a fresh-food supply chain has less room to absorb cost shocks than a packaged-snack one (Inc42, November 2024).
• Competitive crowding in unmanned retail: Daalchini competes directly with other Indian smart-vending operators such as Wendor, in a category where the core hardware and QR-payment experience are not hard to replicate, putting pressure on rental pricing and brand-listing fees over time (Mountain Echo, 2024–25 reporting).
• Franchise-model execution risk: with roughly 95% of machines run by third-party franchise operators rather than Daalchini itself, the company’s quality control, restocking discipline and food-safety standards depend on operators it does not directly employ — a structural risk in any franchise-heavy retail model, and one the company itself has acknowledged by citing food wastage and product-freshness management as ongoing operational challenges (Mountain Echo, 2024–25 reporting).

The takeaway

Daalchini’s path to profit did not run through a better vending machine. It ran through refusing to stay a single-customer business. A company that had built its first 200 kiosks almost entirely around corporate offices was one lockdown away from having no customers left; it survived by moving into factories, hospitals and residential complexes that could not simply send everyone home. The lesson generalises well beyond vending machines: distribution concentrated in one channel is not a strength until it has been tested by that channel disappearing, and the businesses that come out stronger are usually the ones that used the shock to diversify rather than to wait it out.

Frequently asked questions

What does Daalchini Technologies do?

Daalchini designs and deploys IoT-enabled smart vending machines that dispense fresh meals, snacks and beverages in offices, factories, hospitals, colleges and similar locations, paid for through a QR-code and app-based checkout rather than cash.

Who founded Daalchini and when?

Daalchini was founded by former Paytm employees Prerna Kalra and Vidya Bhushan, and was incorporated in Noida on 3 August 2017, with operations launched the following year.

Is Daalchini profitable?

Yes, as of FY25 (year ended March 2025). The company reported a consolidated net profit of ₹2.5 crore on ₹70 crore of revenue, its first profitable year after reporting losses of ₹13.1 crore in FY23 and ₹8.6 crore in FY24 (Inc42, October 2025).

How much funding has Daalchini raised?

Reported cumulative funding is about $8.8 million including a 2024–25 raise that mixed equity and debt (Inc42, October 2025); Crunchbase’s tracker of equity-only rounds puts the figure at roughly $6.73 million. Daalchini has not disclosed a valuation.

How does Daalchini make money?

Roughly 40% of revenue comes from the margin on products sold through its machines, another roughly 40% from monthly machine rental or subscription fees, and the remaining roughly 20% from brand listing fees and advertising on its machines and app.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Inc42, “Daalchini’s Revenue Jumps 56% To INR 18.3 Cr in FY24” — November 2024
• Inc42, “Exclusive: Daalchini Turns Profitable, Posts INR 2.5 Cr PAT In FY25” — October 2025
• Mountain Echo, “Daalchini’s Smart Vending Boom: 2,600+ Outlets, 56% Revenue Growth in FY24” — 2024/2025
• CXO Digital Pulse, “Daalchini Technologies Reports ₹42 Crore Revenue in FY24 After 3.5X Growth” — November 2024
• Adgully, “Daalchini Tech aims to cross Rs 100 cr ARR in the next 12 months: Prerna Kalra” — December 2023
• TechCrunch, “India’s Daalchini raises $4M to make smart stores and vending machines ubiquitous” — September 2022
• India Infoline, “Daalchini raises $4 Million in Series A funding” — September 2022
• Kylas, “Daalchini Case Study” (kiosk growth timeline FY19–FY21) — accessed September 2026
• MyNation, “Meerut woman quits 9-to-5 job to build a vending machine startup” — founder background and early timeline, accessed September 2026
• Crunchbase, Daalchini Technologies company profile (funding tracker) — accessed September 2026
• Company incorporation record via TheCompanyCheck, Daalchini Technologies Private Limited — accessed September 2026

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