Food-delivery company Runnr hires for top deck as TinyOwl founders exit

BENGALURU: Food delivery company Runnr has strengthened its top management with hires from companies including Facebook and Uber, as it looks to fight larger players Swiggy and Zomato Order in a highly competitive business.

Runnr was formed following the merger of two high profile startups—RoadRunnr and Tinyowl.

The announcement comes two months after the Bengaluru-based company closed a $7 million recapitalisation round led by Nexus Venture Partners and Blume Venture Partners, its CEO Mohit Kumar told ET.

Garima Gupta, the chief financial officer at Runnr joins Runnr from Nxtra Data, a Bharti’s data centre business, prior to which she was with Genpact.
Kumar, however, confirmed that Tinyowl’s founders—Harshvardhan Mandand and Saurabh Goyal—have quit the company to pursue other opportunities.

Ankit Jain an IIT-Bombay graduate, joins Runnr from Facebook’s Silicon Valley office to lead data science and advanced machine learning to solve complex last mile logistics problems.

Jain designed a novel spam detection technique for Facebook pages, which was eventually implemented to all the users.

Another top executive at the 151-member team includes Aadish Dhakad, an IIM-Indore alum, who is heading supply operations at Runnr. He was most recently with Uber as its operations manager.

Over the past few months, Runnr has been focusing on corporate food delivery which, according to Kumar, is a big use case. "About 60% of our business comes from B2B and our core proposition is daily orders and healthier meals," he said, adding that the conversion rate for this product is 87% with 4.2 repeat rate per week at an average price of Rs 180. The company is servicing 60 offices in Bengaluru.

Prabhat Agrawal, who is heading Runnr’s corporate meals business, was most recently the chief operating officer at Dazo, a food tech delivery startup, which was shut last year.

Bengaluru is growing faster than Mumbai for the company’s consumer-focused food delivery business with an average order size of Rs 360, said CEO Kumar. "It is still early days," he said.

Runnr has close to 2,200 contract delivery fleet on part-time basis to fulfil demand. The company is expected to complete its integration with Tiny Owl in the next six months.

According to a Morgan Stanley report, online penetration in food and groceries is expected to increase from 3-5% in 2014 to 25-30% in 2020.