Business | Curefoods raises $13M from Iron Pillar, Nordstar, and Binny Bansal
/Curefoods has been acquiring and incubating multiple cloud kitchen brands in the last few months. The fresh influx of funds will be used to acquire many more digital food brands across geographies.
Curefoods, the spin off food tech brand founded by Ankit Nagori in 2020, which operates brands like Eatfit, Yumlane, Aligarh House Biryani, and Masalabox, has raised $13 million funding led by Iron Pillar, Nordstar, and Binny Bansal. Leading angels Adil Allana, Rashmi Kwatra, Lydia Jett, and Kunal Shah also participated in the round, according to a statement.
The company has been acquiring and incubating multiple cloud kitchen brands in the last few months. The fresh influx of funds will be used to acquire many more digital food brands across geographies. Moreover, Curefoods will look to expand its cloud kitchen footprint across multiple cities and build backend technology to manage its multi-brand, multi-city kitchens footprint.
With this fundraise, the total funding raised by the company is at $20 million between Seed and Series A. Curefoods is also looking to close a $10 million debt raise in the coming weeks. According to Ankit, the team now wants to expand from four cities to eight cities in South India in 12 months, and they want to acquire five more brands in the next 12 months.
In a conversation with YourStory, Ankit said, "The pandemic has transformed the way people eat and order food online. Some people did it for convenience and some people for entertainment. This made us believe that there is no one-size-fits-all. While we have been successful with Eatfit with a certain kind of audience at a certain time, we couldn't cater for entertainment of group order. We wanted to have a multi-brand approach that catered to different needs of the audiences."
He added that there are few Indian cloud-kitchen brands that are in the top 10 ordering choices of the consumer across the country, and the regional brands are part of the top 10 brands regionally. "This means the local regional brands haven't had velocity to reach a national level. So we thought to onboard local well-known cloud kitchen brands, which are digital brands, with Curefoods.