InnerChef growth slows down with Rs 15.7 Cr revenue in FY18

Cloud kitchen platform InnerChef’s financials show a sluggish growth in FY18. While the company’s revenue hasn’t shown a significant growth and unable to shrink its expenses, the gap between the income and loss has improved.

The company’s revenue for FY18 is Rs 15.67 crore, a 58.7 per cent increase from Rs 9.87 crore of income in FY17. The losses of the firm have increased by 17.12 per cent, going up from Rs 11.01 crore to Rs 12.89 crore.

The expenses for the foodtech firm went up by 24.81 percent, from being Rs 25.7 crore in FY17 to Rs 32.08 crore in FY18. The manpower service charge, that is the largest area of expenditure for the firm, went up to Rs 6.91 crore, a 51.77 percent hike from Rs 4.55 crore in FY17.

This performance is overall a back-step from last FY where the revenue growth was almost 3X.

The Rajesh Sawhney led company raised a total of Rs 17.16 crore in the fiscal year beginning from April 2017 and ending in March 2018. Out of this Rs 3.96 crore was raised via the issue of Series A Preference Shares in August 2017, and Rs 13.2 crore via Series B Preference Shares issued in December 2017.

The latter amount was poured in by InnerChef’s long-existing investor Mistletoe, the former amount was invested by Smart Venture Capital (lead), 500 Startups IV, and Ignis, Inc.

Recently, the company had raised another round via the issue of Series B Preference Shares worth Rs 13.02 crore lead by Mistletoe (Rs 9.9 crore). Other existing investors Das Capital, Maffin, M&L Partners, and Ignis, Inc also participated.

Even with regular investments, the company hasn't been able to drive revenue growth in FY18 as it did in the preceding fiscal (FY17).

Foodtech is booming right now and expected to outnumber even e-commerce as far as volume is concerned, and cloud kitchen has a better scope for leveraging unit economics as opposed to aggregation. InnerChef is just yet to appropriately capitalise on this advantage.