Enhance your dining experience with peAR Technologies

Food is a must for living and we all expect a minimum standard for the food we eat, be it at home or a restaurant. Sometimes, these conditions are not met at a restaurant and cause immense dissatisfaction, especially if you are very particular about the food you eat.  peAR Technologies is developed by people like you, for you. It is India’s first 3D & Augmented Reality driven food and beverage app. The platform allows the users to project the entire menu with dishes live on their table in 3D even before ordering through its sophisticated AR & 3D model technology. Moreover, users can execute contactless orders, pay digitally and even get loyalty points for visiting their favourite restaurants. Head over to the interview with Parth Ashwin Vora, Co-founder of peAR Technologies, to know more about this platform.

 Parth Ashwin Vora, Co-founder, peAR Technologies 

Give a brief info about your startup?

peAR Technologies is India’s first 3D & Augmented Reality driven food and beverage app. The platform allows the users to project the entire menu along with dishes live on their table in 3D even before ordering through its sophisticated AR & 3D model technology. By enabling the customers to make an informed decision peAR aims to enhance the entire dining experience. Moreover, users can execute contactless orders, pay digitally and even get loyalty points for visiting your favorite restaurants. 

What made you start your startup and what problem does it solve?

The idea of peAR app emerged when we ordered a pancake at a restaurant. Instead of receiving the standard size three-layer pancake, the restaurant served only one piece.  Ascertain to solve the masses problem, led to the origin of peAR app – indulge in exactly the same food you see in the 3D live on your table by just scanning the peAR QR code. 

peAR Technologies provides end to end  solutions to order digitally for the in-dine market.

For Customers: Once he peAR app has been downloaded, scan the QR code to view the menu in 3D & AR, order digitally, pay bill online and also get upto 50% off on ordering via app.  

For Restaurants: peAR charges a fixed commission to restaurant partners only on orders processed via peAR app. It provides free 3D photoshoot for select no. of dishes to all the restaurant partners. For converting, the entire menu in 3D, peAR charges a basic fee of Rs. 5000 per month or Rs.55000 annually.

Using peAR, restaurants have witnessed 20% higher bill value, new customers, analytics on their users, and a way to up-sell inside a restaurant. peAR helps the restaurants with their analytics on most sold dishes, shares reviews and ratings of each dish, and helps in dynamic pricing. A loyalty program has been designed for restaurants, where users get loyalty points for visiting their favorite restaurants again.   This helps increase repeat users to restaurants by 32%.

Tell us about yourself, your previous jobs/ventures? What were you doing before this startup?

peAR Technologies was founded by Dharmin Vora, a Management graduate from N M College of commerce and economics and a food blogger, Parth Vora  and Dhruvesh Metha, who are Computer Science graduates.  

Prior to peAR, Dhruvesh Metha a passionate tech geek launched his 1st startup in 2nd year of his engineering degree called ‘Pixel factory’. He was also responsible in starting a new student chapter called “Unicode” wherein young students can explore tech and learn it practically rather than in a bookish manner.  

Mr. Dharmin Vora has worked on various projects and has a keen interest in marketing, economics and business management. He has always been passionate about food and was always disturbed by misleading ways of food representation and thus came up with this startup. Prior to peAR, he was associated with TVF and The Indian Express. He is a passionate about photogrammetry and 3D modeling enthusiast.

Mr. Parth Vora’s core skills lie in management, digital marketing, Finance & HR. In the past, he has worked with Social Kinnect, JustMedit and helped to grow a multi-million dollar family business. He handles restaurant acquisition and growth at peAR currently. 

Where is your startup based out of? Why do you think that is the best place for you?

peAR is headquartered in Mumbai and was founded in 2019. Having strong roots in Mumbai and being well versed with the market we took the plunge to commence our business in our home city. In spite of pandemic and other hurdles, we have already partnered with leading food chains such as The Ice Cream Bakery, Rome Pizzeria, The Chocolate Room, Pure Milk Centre, Cheelizza, the Angrezi dhaba etc. in Mumbai. The Company is also planning to launch their operations in Delhi NCR as well. 

 peAR Technology has over 25000 users and over 500+ restaurants on the platform currently.  In September 2021, over 8500 orders were processed via app and are on track to do over 25000 monthly orders by end of December 2021.

We plan to expand our operations in 7 cities in the next 12 months. Company is currently growing at 100% Month-on-Month and plan to reach 5 Million Users and 1 Million monthly orders by the end of September 2023

As a startup founder, what are you paranoid about? What keeps you awake at night?

As a founder, you are supposed to wear all hats together.Hence it becomes tough at times as you have to divide your time between all the teams equally. Also,there are a lot of uncertainties during initial days and as a founder you are always supposed to be ready for it no matter what.Setting the right culture and values is always the topmost priority as founders and sometimes you have to make really tough choices to protect your culture even though you have to take a really big hit on your topline numbers. Sometimes you second guess your decisions as founders and this is what keeps you awake at night and hence it is important to always try and remember that it is a journey and you have to enjoy this journey 

Who are your competitors and how are you better than them?

We are the first and the only company in India and in Asia Pacific to have 3D enabled AR based food and beverage app.  Kabaq is our global counterpart in the US. It was acquired by The Glimpse Group, an AR/VR conglomerate. We are lucky to have a huge technological headstart and are trying to capitalize on it as much as we can. Moreover we have a dataset of over 1 Million images on which we have trained our proprietary algorithms and have a huge moat because of it.  

Brief about the founder

Mr. Dhruvesh Mehta, Founder, peAR Technologies 

Dhruvesh Metha is a passionate tech geek. He launched his 1st startup in 2nd year of his engineering degree called ‘Pixel factory’. He was also responsible in starting a new student chapter called “Unicode” wherein young students can explore tech and learn it practically rather than in a bookish manner. Augmented Reality has been his brainchild and focus area since before Pokemon Go exploded on the gaming scene.

Mr. Dharmin Vora , Founder, peAR Technologies 

Dharmin Vora is one of those 19 year old who believes that world can be a much better place and instead of just pondering on and jumping from one idea to another he makes sure every idea gets executed every time. He has worked on various projects and has a keen interest in marketing, economics and business management. He has always been passionate about food and was always disturbed by misleading ways of food representation and thus came up with this startup.

Prior peAR, he was associated with TVF and The Indian Express. He is a passionate about photogrammetry and 3D modeling enthusiast. He is a BMS graduate from Narsee Monjee College of Science & Commerce.

Mr. Parth Vora, Founder, peAR Technologies 

Parth graduated from DJ Sanghvi, college of computer engineering, Mumbai. His core skills lie in management, digital marketing, Finance & HR. Previously, he has worked with Social Kinnect, JustMedit and helped to grow a multi-million dollar family business. At peAR, he heads the growth function. 

How hard is it to have a work-life balance as a startup founder and how do you manage it?

As a founder you are always thinking about some or the other thing about your startup.It s impossible to stop this thoughts and hence we make sure we talk about random stuff to our friends and family everyday. This helps clear the mind and think about things clearly the next day. When you are a startup founder, your family also become founders by default.They have to sacrifice a lot of things because of your dynamic schedule and hence we always try to make sure we stick to our schedule always.We generally plan family day outs on sunday and make sure we take no work calls unless important on sundays.

Have you raised funding? If yes, then we would like to know the details. If no then please tell us if you are looking to raise.

peAR Technologies has raised approximately $500K till date. Our investors include prominent angels and VCs Inflection Point Ventures and VCats – two of India’s largest angel platforms, Government Of India (via Nidhi SSS fund) and Lets Venture. The company plans to raise series A capital towards this year’s end

What’s the biggest misconception people have about you? Why do they have that? What’s the reality?

We started this company when Dharmin was 20, Dhruvesh and parth were 22 and with a very little prior startup experience. Hence people always used to doubt our ability to build a business however we were lucky to find a few mentors and investors to back us on our crazy vision to change the dine-in experience throughout the world. When we see user feedback, it just helps us keep believing in our vision and keep moving forward. Age is not a metric which defines if you will be successful or not. People generally think value experience a lot and it is true that experience helps a lot and is important but we thnk it is also important to have that naiveness and vigour as young people have to build a truly good company in the long run 

What gets you excited about this company?

When you see users use your product – it is the best sight to see as a founder. It gives immense happiness when you see people use different features of your product and then they share their experience with others.This is what actually excites us the most. Moreover when you see how much impact your work has on your employees, their families and your users it just fills you with gratitude.Getting up everyday and try to help more and more people better is what excites us the most 

Tell us how a day in your life looks like? Your schedule for a day right from the time you get up till you hit the bed at night.

We generally try to wake up by 7 am and pray. Then we go to the gym by 8 am and come back by 9 am. Then we get ready and pack our food and leave for office by 10 am and reach office by 11 am. We generally take team meeting calls while travelling. This helps us set the tone of the day. Once we reach office, we reply to all the mails first. Post that we have internal team meetings from 12 am – 2pm. It is followed by lunch time from 2 pm – 2:30 pm. All the team members and founders always have lunch together like a family. This helps us increase team bonding a lot. Post lunch, all founders sit with their individual teams and finish their day to day targets. We then write our targets for the next day and generally end our day by 8pm in office. We come back to home by 9pm. We have a founders call while we are travelling and discuss about monthly plans we need to achieve as a company. We then spend our time with family and have dinner. It is the followed by either watching some movies or tv series or reading some biography of some founders. This is a typical day in our lives 

We have brain storming session with all the team members on saturday mornings and generally have movie or game nights on saturday evenings. 

Tell us about your team and how did you meet each other?

Dharmin and parth are brothers. Since childhood we always used to discuss about all the businesses and companies and then try to replicate it at small scale in our lives. We used to sell first copies of shoes and watches on instagram and also sell stock market courses to young students and teach them basics of stock market. parth and dhruvesh were classmates. they were together while they were studying computer engineering. Post college, dharmin and parth used to work from a startup incubator and dhruvesh always used to come and work from the same office. When we visited a restaurant one fine day, we were severely disappointed when we ordered a pancake and there was only 1 layer instead of a 3;layer pancake. This is when the light bulb went off and we decided to solve this for all the people who used to face similar problems while dining in.

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