Curefoods Pvt Ltd, a cloud kitchen startup founded by Cure.fit cofounder Ankit Nagori, announced on Friday that it has acquired seven food brands just months after raising a Series A round of funding.
Curefoods in a statement said, the brands it acquired include all-day Indian breakfast meals brand Paratha Box, biryani brand Ammi’s Biryani, subscription-based home-cooked meals MasalaBox, online confectionery brand Cake Zone, and online ‘chaat’ brand Chaat Street.
Curefoods now holds ten brands in addition to exclusive online franchising rights for three brands, Aligarh House, Sharief Bhai, and YumLane, as a result of this acquisition. The cloud kitchen startup seeks to onboard a total of 25 brands by 2021 and has also signed around 15 letters of intent (LOI).
Curefoods promises to follow a 21-day end-to-end closure process when onboarding such brands, therefore the announcement for the other brands is expected by mid-November. The startup is combining its end-to-end farm-to-fork technology and a consumer-focused marketing stack to incorporate these brands into the business. Besides that, Curefoods promises that its expertise in administering central kitchen facilities will enable it to drive these acquired food brands and accelerate their growth.
Ankit Nagori, the founder of Curefoods, commented on these developments saying, “We are on a mission to make good food easily accessible at affordable prices and to do this, we are acquiring a host of brands that people recognize and love. Given the accelerated growth of cloud kitchens in India, especially since the pandemic, we want to leverage our market expertise and advanced technology in order to elevate and amplify the experiences these brands offer.”
Nagori has secured $13 million from Iron Pillar, Nordstar, and Binny Bansal, the co-founder of Flipkart, to acquire and nurture emerging cloud kitchen platforms, as well as a $10 million debt round from Alteria Capital. These proceeds will be used to strengthen the company’s cloud kitchen presence across multiple cities and develop backend technologies to manage operations.
Curefoods competes in the cloud kitchen space with food tech unicorn Rebel Foods, which handles 450+ kitchens and 4K+ online restaurants globally spanning more than 60 cities across 10 countries. Amongst some of the popular Rebel Foods brands are Faasos, Mandarin Oak, The Good Bowl, Behrouz Biryani, SLAY Coffee, Ovenstory Pizza, Sweet Truth, and Wendy’s.
However, unlike Rebel Foods, which creates, builds, and manages the brands under its name through exclusive collaborations, Curefoods plans to purchase 35+ brands by the end of 2022, paying EBITDA multiples of 8-15x. Curefoods competes with the likes of Food Darzee, Healthie, Box8, and others, in addition to industry giants like Zomato and Swiggy, which have entered the cloud kitchen market alongside Rebel Foods.
Curefoods enters a growing list of startups that have emerged with the objective of acquiring direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands or third-party retailers on e-commerce platforms like Amazon in order to build a massive portfolio of businesses.
