Exclusive: Rebel Foods valuation jumps to $700 Mn in fresh $50 Mn round

The covid-19 epidemic has thrown all kinds of businesses on a reset mode. There are hardly any positive developments happening across the spectrum including startups. To cope with the disruption, Indian startups have been laying off and if not then resorting on significant pay cuts.

However, there are some silver linings as well. Sachin Bansal put in over Rs 3,000 crore in Navi Technologies, Reliance pumped Rs 500 crore in Embibe while BigBasket raised a $50 million-plus bridge round. Now, a big news is coming out from Rebel Foods.

The company has scooped up $50 million from Coatue PE Asia in series E round. According to regulatory filings, Rebel Foods, which runs food brands such as Faasos among others, has allotted 5,627 Series E1 CCPS shares to Coatue PE Asia at a price band of Rs 6.39-6.74 lakhs per share to raise the aforementioned amount.

The price per share has inflated by nearly 39% as compared to the Series D round in September. At that time, Coatue PE Asia had invested $125 million in the third tranche of its Series D round. Post investment, the PE firm will control close to 22% stake in Rebel Foods. 

According to Entrackr’s back-of-the-envelope calculation, Rebel Foods has crossed the $700 million valuation mark. It’s an eye-popping $200 million valuation jump for the Mumbai-based cloud-kitchen firm in less than 6 months. The company was valued nearly $504 million in September 2019.

Interestingly, Rebel Foods is also investing Rs 3 crore in home-cooked food distribution FoodBuddy, the regulatory filings further reveal. The Jaydeep Barman-led company aims to leverage FoodyBuddy's network of about a 1,000 home cooks to foray into the home-cooked meals vertical.

Almost a decade old company, Rebel Foods was founded in 2015 by Barman. It runs multi-brand cloud kitchens across brand names – Faasos, Oven Story, Firangi Bake, Mandarin Oak, Kettle & Eggs, and Behrouz. Apart from its own app, it roughly generates about 60% of its demand via aggregators – Swiggy, Zomato and UberEats.

Rebel Foods is the third most-valued food-tech firm after Swiggy and Zomato, which are valued at $3.6 billion and $3.25 billion, respectively. Zomato had narrowed the valuation gap with the Napsers-backed firm when it raised $50 million from Ant Financials and $5 million from Pacific Horizon Investment Trust.