Ankit Nagori-led Curefoods bags $13 Mn in Series A round

Curefoods, which operates cloud kitchen brand Eat.Fit, has raised a $13 million Series A round led by Iron Pillar with participation from Nordstar and Binny Bansal. Leading angels Adil Allana, Rashmi Kwatra, Lydia Jett, and Kunal Shah also participated in the round.

This brings the money raised by Curefoods to a total of $20 million between its seed and Series A. According to the company, it is also looking to close a $10 million debt raise in the coming weeks.

Curefoods’ biz and future plans

Curefoods kicked off its operations in 2020 and operates cloud kitchen brands like Eat.Fit, Yumlane, Aligarh House Biryani, and Masalabox. The company claims to have over 25 kitchens across four cities in India. 

The proceeds will be used to acquire digital food brands across geographies and the company will look to expand its cloud kitchen footprint across multiple cities and build backend technology to manage its multi-brand, multi-city kitchens footprint, said Curefoods in a press release.

In a nutshell, the Ankit Nagori-led firm will acquire online food brands which are listed on food-delivery platforms such as Zomato and Swiggy. This is quite similar to Thrasio style startups which acquire and scale third-party brands(D2C) that sell on e-commerce marketplaces such as Amazon and Flipkart. Food brands possibly offer even more potential due to the strong regional differences in consumption habits and tastes.  

According to Nagori, there will be multiple $50 million brands in the future in the online delivery space and the company is in a great position to build, acquire, and own many of them. 

Recall: Curefoods’ hive off, Nagori’s swap deal and Cure.Fit’s acquisition by Tata

In October last year, health and fitness company Cure.Fit announced to hive off its cloud kitchen vertical Eat.Fit [under Curefoods] to work as a separate entity. Before starting the separate vertical Nagori had 7.6% stake in Cure.Fit, however, he increased his ownership in Eat.Fit to 70-80% as part of an equity swap deal.

The reason behind the hive off was scaling down of Eat.Fit due to the first wave of coronavirus pandemic that hit the company’s business severely. In August 2020, the firm had pulled the plug on Eat.Fit across 12 cities including Delhi (NCR), Mumbai and Chennai. 

According to Fintrackr estimates, Nagori still had a 0.3% stake in Cure.Fit until February 2021.

While Nagori was leading the foodtech vertical of Cure.Fit, the latter has been acquired by Tata Digital. In June, the subsidiary of Tata Sons Private Ltd had signed a strategic deal to invest up to $75 million in Cure.Fit. As a part of the deal, Mukesh Bansal, co-founder and CEO of Curefit, joined Tata Digital as president and will continue in his leadership role at the Bengaluru-based company.