Ankit Nagori’s Curefoods raises funds from Iron Pillar, Binny Bansal for Thrasio-for-food play

Curefoods, started by Cure.fit co-founder Ankit Nagori has raised $13 million led by venture firm Iron Pillar, Nordstar and Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal to acquire and incubate growing cloud kitchen platforms.

Angel investors such as Adil Allana, hedge fund investor Rashmi Kwatra, SoftBank’s Lydia Jett, and  CRED’s Kunal Shah have also invested.

Moneycontrol first reported the deal earlier this week 

Curefoods is also closing a $10 million debt round in the next few weeks- a key tool to acquire young companies and plans to use the money to expand its cloud kitchen footprint across multiple cities and build backend technology to manage its multi-brand, multi-city kitchens footprint.

“Online food delivery in India is highly fragmented with almost no Indian-origin brands amongst the top ten across the country. In the next decade, there is an opportunity to build and incubate brands across cuisines with meaningful scale. There will be multiple $50Mn brands in the future in the online delivery space and we believe we are in a great position to build, acquire, and own many of them. Use of technology, precise digital marketing, profitable growth, and great brand building will be the key ingredients for success here,” Nagori said.

Last year, Nagori had acquired a 70-80 percent stake in Eat.fit, the cloud kitchen firm meant to promote healthy eating, in exchange for his 7.6 percent stake in Cure.fit. Eat.fit had scaled down significantly mid-last year, shutting down operations in 12 cities due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since then, operations have recovered, although it is unclear how many cities it is operating in currently. Eat.fit has about Rs 2-3 crore revenue a month, these people said.

Curefoods has so far acquired four brands- Yumlane, Aligarh House Biryani, and Masalabox, and plans to acquire six more brands in the next six months, Nagori told Moneycontrol. It plans to have 100 kitchens by the end of the year and with an annual revenue run rate of $20 million.

While firms such as Rebel Foods have built a slew of cloud-kitchen brands by starting each brand themselves, Nagori plans to acquire up-and-coming online food brands listed on food-delivery platforms Swiggy and Zomato. This approach is similar to the one followed by US-based breakout startup Thrasio, which acquires top-rated and fast-growing sellers on Amazon, helping them with technology, digital marketing and sales chops to turbocharge growth.

While this approach is relatively new in food delivery, these e-commerce roll-up plays have also caught fire in India, with over $300 million being invested in such startups, based only on their promise and little else.

Jaydeep Barman, CEO of Rebel Foods acknowledged the trend in a LinkedIn post recently but said he had this thesis way before ‘hot this season’ themes like Thrasio kicked in. 

A few months ago, Rebel started Launcher, a platform for hosting, licensing, investing in or acquiring food brands.