Curefoods raises $13 mn in Iron Pillar-led Series A

Curefoods, a cloud kitchen platform floated by Cure.fit co-founder Ankit Nagori, on Wednesday said it has secured $13 million (Rs 96.2 crore) as part of its Series A funding round led by venture firm Iron Pillar. 

The funding round saw participation from Nordstar and Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal, said Curefoods in a statement. 

Angel investors Adil Allana, Rashmi Kwatra, Lydia Jett and Kunal Shah also pooled in capital as part of this funding round. 

With the latest funding round, Curefoods, which operates brands like EatFit, Yumlane, Aligarh House Biryani and Masalabox, had raised $20 million so far. 

The company is also looking to close a debt round in the coming weeks. 

The company will use the fresh capital to acquire more digital food brands across geographies and expand across multiple cities. 

Part of the funds will also be deployed to build backend technology to manage its multi-brand, multi-city kitchens footprint. 

Curefoods joins a growing list of ventures which have come up with a view to acquiring direct-to- consumer (D2C) brands or third-party sellers on e-commerce platforms such as Amazon to create a large portfolio of businesses.   

Some of them have already raised their first institutional cheques such as Flipkart-backed GOAT Brand Labs; Mensa Brands, floated by former Myntra and Medlife CEO Ananth Narayan; and SoftBank-backed FirstCry’s GlobalBees. 

Just last week, Presight Capital and an undisclosed global hedge fund led a $42.5 million Series A round of funding in Gurugram headquartered UpScalio which aggregates and invests in e-commerce brands. 

Curefoods' Nagori noted that there is an opportunity to build and incubate brands across cuisines with meaningful scale in the next decade. 

“There will be multiple $50-million 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,” he said. 

Anand Prasanna, managing partner at Iron Pillar, said that online food delivery is an area that saw a significant long-term positive shift in adoption over the last 18 months. 

“Globally, many very large food businesses are created over time through roll-up of food brands. We believe that the same can be replicated in India today, with online delivery providing the distribution depth and efficiency,” he added. 

Nagori had co-founded CureFit Healthcare in 2016 with Mukesh Bansal, who earlier co-founded fashion ecommerce platform Myntra (which was acquired by Flipkart). 

Nagori was previously with Flipkart. 

In October last year, Cure.fit said it will spin out its cloud kitchen brand Eat.fit into a separate entity to enable the cloud kitchen business to raise equity capital independent of the holding company for business expansion. 

According to a Moneycontrol report, Nagori swapped his stake in Cure.fit to take control of Eat.fit. 

Earlier in June, Tata Digital, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Group holding entity Tata Sons, said it has entered into an agreement to invest up to $75 million (Rs545 crore) in CureFit Healthcare.  

As part of the transaction, Mukesh Bansal will join Tata Digital in an executive role.