100 Stores. ₹75 Crore ARR. A Cup Of Coffee In Under 90 Seconds: The abCoffee Story

Before Abhijeet Anand was building a coffee chain, he was managing $2 billion worth of projects across Asia, Africa, and Europe for Schlumberger, one of the world’s largest oilfield services companies. He was earning ₹1.3 crore a year. By any reasonable measure, the career was working.

The coffee, in India, was not.

Anand was an IIT Dhanbad graduate who had spent nearly a decade in environments where the infrastructure around daily professional life, including the coffee that powered it, was built to a high standard and priced accordingly. Back in India, the choice was stark: pay ₹200 to ₹400 for a decent cup at a café that was also charging you for the wi-fi, the couch, and the air conditioning, or settle for something considerably worse at a fraction of the price. The actual cost of making a cup of specialty coffee was not the problem. Everything built around it was.

Anand saw that structure as a design problem rather than an inevitable market condition. In 2022, he left Schlumberger, walked away from the ₹1.3 crore salary, and founded abCoffee.

The Grab-And-Go Model India Had Not Built Yet

abCoffee’s founding premise was precise: take the cost of the real estate, the seating, the wi-fi, and the café experience out of the price of the coffee, stripping menu prices down to start affordably around ₹99 and sell a genuinely good cup at a price that the urban professional making a morning commute could afford every single day without thinking about it.

The model is built around small-format, technology-enabled kiosks rather than sprawling full-service cafés. Each outlet operates with a minimal 150–200 sq. ft. footprint, engineered for ultra-lean store economics and rapid capital payback periods under 12 months. Customers order through a proprietary app, walk up, and collect their order in under 90 seconds, a turnaround time that makes it one of the fastest players in India’s specialty coffee category.

More than half of all takeaway orders are now placed through the abCoffee app, backed by a monthly subscription platform that pre-sells tens of thousands of beverages. These are not vanity metrics: they are indicators of the habitual, high-frequency purchase behaviour that every consumer beverage brand tries to build and most never achieve.

The company started with 7 outlets in Mumbai. By expanding aggressively into tech parks and business hubs across Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Delhi-NCR, the brand scaled past 100 outlets. This rapid expansion pushed its annual recurring revenue run rate to approximately ₹75 crore, placing the business among the fastest-scaling specialty coffee brands in Indian retail history on a per-outlet basis.

From Seed To Pre-Series B Funding

The funding trajectory confirms that institutional investors have read the same signals the company’s internal metrics are showing. abCoffee raised early capital through a pre-seed and seed round, followed by a $3.4 million Series A led by Nexus Venture Partners. In May 2026, the company secured a significant ₹61 crore ($7.3M+) pre-Series B round led by Kliff Ventures (the consumer retail fund created by K Hospitality Corp), with continued participation from existing backers like Nexus Venture Partners and Tanglin Venture Partners, alongside Hero Enterprise Partner Ventures and Stride Ventures.

Total institutional funding stands at approximately $12 million to $13 million, a remarkably disciplined capital base for a company that has scaled past 100 tech-enabled stores while doubling its overall revenue year-on-year and watching store-level EBITDA surge significantly. This frugality is deliberate, reflecting a unit economics philosophy that prioritises getting the per-store model right before scaling it widely.

Beyond Coffee: Building A Beverage Platform

abCoffee’s ambition has expanded beyond the original grab-and-go coffee proposition. The company has introduced matcha beverages alongside its core coffee range, capturing a broader trend in urban India toward premium, functional drinks that signal taste and health consciousness simultaneously. Additionally, the Procaff brand, a specialized protein coffee product launched under the abCoffee umbrella that extends the offering into the wellness category, capturing customers looking for caffeine and functional nutrition in a single convenient format.

India’s broader market context makes the timing propitious. The country is the world’s seventh-largest coffee producer and fifth-largest exporter, yet per capita coffee consumption remains well below global averages. Growth is heavily concentrated among urban millennials and Gen Z consumers who prefer premium products that fit the abCoffee value proposition: quality without the café surcharge.

An IIT graduate who walked away from a ₹1.3 crore salary because India’s coffee was not good enough at a price that made sense has built the operational infrastructure to prove he was right. One hundred stores, ₹75 crore in ARR, a cup ready in 90 seconds: abCoffee is making its argument one order at a time.