During his younger days, Jaydeep Barman, the 51-year-old co-founder of Rebel Foods, was fond of “football, food and laziness”. While the first two remain an abiding passion — the second one, in fact, has reaped rich dividends in his professional life — Barman has obviously given up on his fondness for the third one. For, laziness certainly can’t be associated with a co-founder who in a span of 20 years has turned a 100 square feet delivery/takeaway store in Pune into a food brand whose operating revenue in FY24 was over Rs 1,400 crore.
Investors have backed him to the hilt. Starting with a $1.37-million seed round from PeakXV (then Sequoia), Rebel has to date raised over $773 million in funding across 20 rounds. The Mumbai-based company has 8,000 employees and is backed by marquee names such as KKR and Temasek, among others. The company is hoping to launch an initial public offer in the next 12-18 months.
But Barman wears success lightly. “A lot of entrepreneurs whom I know had a spark even when they were very young, but I didn’t have any,” he says in a matter-of-fact tone, and then proceeds to give examples of his “ordinary-ness”. A BTech from Jadavpur University, Burman admits his academic performance was quite mediocre but he is proud of the fact that he developed a keen interest in mountaineering, a passion that has stayed on.
After completing his engineering in 1996, Barman got into IIM Lucknow but couldn’t bag lucrative job offers and had to settle for Mirc Electronics, the maker of Onida televisions. He was posted in Siliguri and spent most of his time trekking instead of the job he was supposed to do — that is selling TVs.
All this while, entrepreneurship never occurred to him. Understandably so, as he hails from an academically oriented middle-class family, where entrepreneurship was never a career option. His father was an economics professor and his mother a mathematics teacher.
The first turning point came during his stint at Brainvisa, an e-learning solutions startup founded by Supam Maheshwari, who is now the co-founder and CEO of FirstCry, and Anand Lunia, now founding partner of India Quotient. “Anand was my senior at IIM Lucknow and I joined his firm as one of the first 10-15 employees in Pune,” he says. Barman worked there for around four years and learnt the nuances of how startups work. In the meantime, he was also travelling the world selling software.
In fact during these trips, Barman started missing Kolkata’s kathi rolls. That craving gave birth to Rebel. Around the same time, his friend from Jadavpur University and IIM, Kallol Banerjee, now the co-founder of Rebel Foods, also joined Brainvisa. “Both of us were recently married and stayed in the same apartment, while our wives were working elsewhere,” he says with a grin. The two friends got inspired to start “something on the side”. “We thought many others who are staying away from Kolkata would be missing kathi rolls pretty much the way we did. So, why not start a one-stop destination for rolls ?”
That’s how the startup took shape. Barman’s hunch proved to be correct as the tiny store started clocking `2-3 lakh monthly sales, encouraging them to open another. Business was doing well, but Barman started getting impatient, and studying felt like a default option. He joined INSEAD for a one-year full-time MBA programme. This turned out to be the second pivotal moment in Barman’s life.
The course would cost him `1 crore but his father mortgaged his house to organise the money, leaving Barman with no other option but to get a “high-paying job”. The self-proclaimed lazy guy says he worked hard and landed a job at McKinsey, London, where he got the opportunity to work with Fortune 500 CEOs on their biggest problem statements. Parallelly, he also learnt the “first principles thinking”, which he applies at Rebel even today…any time a problem arises.
After a few years at McKinsey, he and his wife decided to raise their daughter in India. In 2010, Barman took a sabbatical and came back. By this time, the Pune stores, which were being managed by the employees as franchisees, were doing well. That was the time when India’s startup ecosystem was also booming. So, Barman decided to create a vibrant food brand with a global footprint. He took over the two stores, with an investment from Luna and this marked the start of Faasos in 2011. Banerjee, who had also gone to INSEAD, joined him six months later.
The founders continued with the same small takeaway model and opened 40 more stores across Pune, Bengaluru and Mumbai. “Soon, we understood the reason why India didn’t have restaurant chains on the high streets. The rentals were humongous— even more than that of the US. To tide over this glitch, the founders decided to pivot to a cloud kitchen model to achieve better scale. The first one came up on the first floor of a back alley building in 2015, followed by a couple of more in the first year.
“The delivery format was also growing. So, we decided to experiment with kitchen rather than a store,” he says. Today, the firm is also betting big on its newly launched 15-minute food delivery service billed ‘Quickies by EatSure’. In 2018, the company was renamed as Rebel Foods, and within three years it transformed into a unicorn. Currently, the firm has over 450 smart kitchens in 75 cities in India as well as in the UK and UAE. Meanwhile, Faasos continues to be one of the brands owned by Rebel along with Behrouz Biryani, Oven Story Pizza, Lunch Box, Firangi Bake, among others. It has also taken up the franchise of Wendy’s for both offline and online retail.
Barman says his management philosophy is simple. “I’m fundamentally on the lazier side of the spectrum and a national delegator. So, at Rebel, we have a culture of founder mentality, defined by freedom and responsibility,” he says. That gives him enough time to continue to go on treks with his college friends.