House of F&B brands: Curefoods capitalised on the opportunity to build a large homegrown food business

Ankit Nagori, CEO and founder of Curefoods, was only 24 when he joined Flipkart in February 2010. It was a large startup, hyper-funded, and there was never a cash crunch. Joining a company like that so early on and rising to the position of chief business officer in no time was a breakthrough moment for Nagori. “That kind of opportunity is rare. If you get it, you make the most out of it,” he says. Nagori spent every day at Flipkart, building and scaling new businesses. “My six-seven-year stint at Flipkart was almost equal to 20 years in any company. Binny (Bansal) has been a mentor ever since,” he says.

This exposure to a fast-paced startup culture motivated Nagori to try out entrepreneurship, something he had once attempted soon after graduating from IIT Guwahati way back in 2007. He had launched a social media sentiment analysis startup called Youthpad. Though the venture didn’t quite take off, Nagori says IIT Guwahati was like a launchpad. “You are exposed to things at IIT that you normally don’t get access to — clubs, communities and more. This is where I also started reading up a lot about internet companies such as PayPal, Amazon, eBay and Facebook,” he says.

But after the first failed startup attempt, it was Flipkart that made him fall in love with the idea of calling something his own again. “As we were building Flipkart, the overall startup ecosystem was getting built out. So many things that we did at Flipkart were being done for the first time. Things that used to take many years to get built were getting done in 6-7 years.”

His second attempt at entrepreneurship was a tough one, given the glory, money and everything else that comes with being a CXO at Flipkart. But, hailing from a business family, Nagori had their support from day one. And he jumped right in.

In 2016, Nagori co-founded wellness startup Curefit (umbrella brand of Cult.fit, later rebranded to Cult.fit) with the founder of Myntra, Mukesh Bansal. The business idea clicked well with Indian customers and the startup grew significantly in four years. Nagori then wanted to focus on building a large food business. And that’s when the pandemic happened and cloud kitchen as a business model was picking up. So, Nagori decided to spin off EatFit (Cult.fit’s healthy food vertical) into Curefoods as an independent company in 2020. “Pandemic provided a great opportunity for good cloud businesses. That’s when I thought that Cult.fit would survive and bounce back. But, there was an opportunity to build an independent food business.”

The main reason behind branching out and building an independent company was to build an umbrella of multiple food and beverage (F&B) brands. “You can only do healthy brands under EatFit. To introduce pizza or biryani, we had to build a house of brands. And, we had the infrastructure to run central kitchens,” he says. Nagori wanted to use the existing assets better by adding more cuisine. And, there were two ways to do so — either by building it himself or by partnering with small restaurants that were struggling to survive due to the pandemic blow. Curefoods started acquiring and partnering brands. “And, suddenly, the utilisation of the kitchen improved, and the number of options that customers had improved.”

From a health food business, it became a multibrand business with biryani, pizza, desserts and other cuisines. However, during the pandemic, it limited itself to Bengaluru. In 2021-2022, as the world started opening up, the firm added more geographies, kitchens and cuisines and the business took off. According to Entrackr, between October10, 2020 and March 31, 2021, the firm posted a revenue of `1.96 crore from operations. Curefoods also started focusing on offline expansion around the same time. “We realised that at certain parts of the day, people love to step out. And if you are building a large business around food, you need to have non-cloud businesses as well.”

Nagori didn’t want to raise external funding in the first few months. “I funded it, and I have continued to do so in multiple rounds later.” In May 2021, Nagori reached out to Iron Pillar for Curefoods’ first institutional round. It raised $13 million in the Series A funding round led by Iron Pillar. The round also included participation from Nordstar and Binny Bansal. In December 2024, the firm raised $40 million in a Series D funding round, in a mix of primary and secondary investments. According to Tracxn, Curefoods has so far raised a total of $175 million in funding from investors like Chiratae Ventures, Three State Capital and Accel, with a post money valuation of `3,820 crore as on December 12, 2024.

Today, the Bengaluru-based startup houses many F&B brands such as EatFit, Sharief Bhai Biryani, Olio Pizza, Frozen Bottle, Nomad Pizza, Cakezone, among others. It also runs restaurants and takeaway kiosks in over 500 locations in 50 cities.

The startup has also recently acquired the pan-India rights for the global doughnut and coffee chain Krispy Kreme. “We have now established an engine where we can mount more brands and start distributing those brands from our existing assets.” Curefoods is also eyeing an IPO by the end of 2025.