Teaxpress-Sipping Success: Kaushal Dugar is not your conventional Marwari entrepreneur. When aged six, he started a book lending library and signed up his friends as paying clients. Now, at 30, Dugar dreams of creating an international Indian tea brand

There are sceptics. Independent tea industry consultant Soumitra Basu says the very nature of [Kaushal Dugar]'s business model will fetter his growth in India's 980-miilion kg market, 55 per cent of which is accounted for by branded teas. "Exporters need to sample the tea, which is done in auctions," says Basu, who formerly worked with J. Thomas & Co. Pvt. Ltd, the world's largest tea auctioneers. "This can't be so with teas sold through the Net. He'll never reach big volumes, I'd say annual sales will be in the 30,000-50,000 kg range, tops." That way, he says, the buyer learns of other varieties to try out. "The idea is to offer a tea experience," says [Ashok Kumar], who believes Dugar's online marketing strategy is "potentially huge". On his part, Dugar boasts, no Indian tea company uses technology the way his does. "We are the only tea company which has a dedicated tech team," he says. "We are using tech to create processes for each aspect of our operations, which has never been done in the industry." In a nod to his business model, venture capital firms Accel Partners and Singapore's Horizon Ventures have invested undisclosed sums in Teaxpress. Dugar won't specify the investment lined up over the next few months, except for saying: "It's in crores", and his backers are not spilling either. "It's a small seed amount, we'll scale it up later," says Prashanth Prakash, partner at Accel, the VC investor behind Indian online success stories Myntra and Flipkart. "We start small, like we did with Flipkart."