Tea cafe chain Chaayos plans to expand presence in Mumbai & Delhi; to open 20-30 outlets in few months

Homegrown tea cafe chain Chaayos is looking to scale up its presence in Mumbai and Delhi, and plans to open about 20-30 outlets in the next few months.

"We are looking at expanding in and around our current hubs Delhi and Mumbai. We are looking to open about 20-30 outlets in the next few months," Chaayos co-founder Raghav Verma told PTI.

Chaayos currently runs 31 outlets across Delhi-NCR and Mumbai.

"We can open another 15-20 outlets in Mumbai itself going forward, as it is under-penetrated. We are looking to open outlets in Pune, Gujarat, Goa, Chandigarh, Jaipur, and highways around NCR this year," he added.

The Tiger Global-backed company is also betting big on the deliveries business, Verma said.

"Our deliveries business is growing rapidly at almost 20% month-on-month," he said.

"We were earlier investing in third-party deliveries, but now we do it on our own. We were not able to deliver the customer experience we expected through third-party deliveries, so we decided to do it ourselves," he said.

Currently, the company has over 600 employees and is looking to double this number as it expands more stores this year.

While the company did not speak about further investments, or when they will be able to break even, Verma said that every store is "making money on an operational level, every other month".

The tea cafe chain was founded in November 2012 by Raghav Verma and Nitin Saluja. It had raised close to $5 million from Tiger Global in 2015.