Startup Deep Dive : Biryani By Kilo — Raised at Rs 840 crore, sold for Rs 520 crore

In December 2023, investors valued Biryani By Kilo at roughly Rs 840 crore (~$28 million, at the rate below, for its FY24 revenue alone). Sixteen months later, the company that pioneered India’s dum-cooked, deliver-in-the-handi biryani sold a controlling stake for an implied Rs 520 crore, even though revenue had grown 23 percent and losses had shrunk 30 percent in the meantime.

That contradiction sits at the heart of Biryani By Kilo’s story: a brand that turned a single dish into a nationally recognised cloud-kitchen chain, raised more than $55 million across nine years, and then, in April 2025, became a subsidiary of KFC and Pizza Hut operator Devyani International at a lower valuation than the one venture capital had assigned it a year earlier. What that markdown reveals about the economics of cloud-kitchen biryani is the subject of this piece.

Quick facts

What they do

Biryani By Kilo sells one dish, done several ways: chicken, mutton, prawn and vegetarian biryani, along with kebabs, curries and desserts, cooked to order and delivered in a sealed clay or metal handi rather than a plastic container. It reaches customers through its own app and website, through Swiggy and Zomato, and increasingly through dine-in restaurants, across more than 100 outlets in over 40 Indian cities as of its April 2025 acquisition filing. Its customer is the urban biryani eater who wants restaurant-grade dum-cooked biryani at home rather than the mass-produced version most delivery kitchens send out, and who is willing to pay a premium for a full handi meant to serve two to three people at a time.

The origin

Vishal Jindal was not a restaurateur. He was an IIT-BHU engineer with an MBA from Syracuse University who had spent years in private equity, eventually co-founding the fund Carpediem Capital Partners. The idea for Biryani By Kilo came to him in 2012, on a trip back to his hometown of Agra, where he found himself asking why global fast-food chains had built billion-dollar businesses on food nowhere near as good as what Indian home kitchens produced, while no Indian brand had done the same with an Indian dish. He settled on biryani for three specific reasons: it travels well without falling apart, it works as a complete meal rather than a snack, and it has appeal across almost every region of India. He teamed up with Kaushik Roy, who brought more than two decades of foodservice operations experience overseeing over 200 restaurants, and Ritesh Sinha as co-founder and eventual COO. The three launched Biryani By Kilo as a delivery-first brand in Gurugram in May 2015. Its signature move was not the recipe but the ritual: each order was dum-cooked individually in its own handi, sealed, and delivered with a small earthen angeethi so the customer could warm and finish the dish at the table, restaurant-style, rather than eating out of a reheated tub. The name promised bulk; the process delivered the opposite: batch-of-one cooking that most cloud kitchens, built for volume, could not easily copy.

The struggle years

The growth curve for Biryani By Kilo’s first four years was closer to a slow simmer than a rocket. The company opened two outlets in 2015, doubled that to four in 2016, and by March 2019 had scaled to only 18 outlets, clocking monthly revenue of about Rs 3 crore. For a Delhi-NCR startup pitching itself as a future pan-India food brand, that pace tested investor patience.

The low point came in 2019. A prospective investor walked away from a funding conversation, telling Jindal directly that the biryani-delivery market was not large enough to justify a venture-scale bet. With capital running low and the round not closing, Jindal has since described the period as one where the company came close to running out of runway entirely. The rescue arrived in June 2019, when IvyCap Ventures led a $5 million Series A round that let Biryani By Kilo keep expanding rather than shut down.

The second setback came just as the company appeared to be back on track. As Biryani By Kilo expanded into new cities coming out of the pandemic, its net loss did not shrink with scale, it jumped 2.7 times, to Rs 42.6 crore in FY22 from Rs 15.6 crore in FY21, even as revenue roughly doubled to Rs 133 crore. Growth, it turned out, was easy to buy and hard to make profitable.

The turning point

The defining event was not a funding round but an acquisition. On 24 April 2025, Devyani International, the listed operator of KFC, Pizza Hut and Costa Coffee outlets in India, announced its board had approved buying an 80.72 percent equity stake in Sky Gate Hospitality, the parent of Biryani By Kilo, Goila Butter Chicken and The Bhojan, for Rs 419.31 crore, paid mainly through a preferential allotment of about 2.37 crore Devyani shares at Rs 176.78 apiece to Sky Gate’s roughly 79 shareholders. The arithmetic behind that price is the number worth sitting with: Rs 419.31 crore for 80.72 percent implies a value of only around Rs 520 crore for the whole of Sky Gate, a portfolio built mainly around Biryani By Kilo. Sixteen months earlier, in December 2023, Biryani By Kilo alone had raised its Series C at a post-money valuation of roughly Rs 840 crore. On one side of the turning point: a venture-backed brand valued near Rs 840 crore, still burning cash. On the other: the same business, now growing faster and losing less, folded into a listed QSR conglomerate at a price nearly 40 percent lower. Devyani’s own disclosures framed the logic plainly, calling Sky Gate a subsidiary from the date of acquisition and giving Biryani By Kilo access to Devyani’s network of more than 1,500 stores, over half of them outside India’s metro cities, as a distribution shortcut no amount of venture funding could buy as cheaply.

The money behind it

Biryani By Kilo’s capital-raising history runs through three distinct phases, each tied to a specific backer:

• IvyCap Ventures led the $5 million Series A in June 2019, arriving after a rival investor had pulled out and effectively keeping the company solvent through its lowest point.
• Falcon Edge Capital led a $35 million Series B in November 2021, the company’s largest single round, which funded its post-pandemic push into new cities such as Bengaluru and Hyderabad.
• Alpha Wave Ventures led a $9 million (about Rs 72 crore) Series C in December 2023, taking a reported 33.5 percent post-round stake and becoming the largest external shareholder; IvyCap (about 19.4 percent), IndCred Wealth and Clear Bridge Ventures also participated in that round.

By the time of that Series C, total funding raised stood at roughly $55 million, according to Entrackr’s review of the round. The company’s own filings put its Series C post-money valuation at approximately Rs 840 crore (~$105 million). That was the last independently priced venture round before Devyani’s April 2025 acquisition brought outside fundraising to a close.

How it makes money

• Food sales carry the business: biryani, kebabs, korma and curries made up 94.76 percent of FY24 operating revenue, at Rs 254 crore.
• Delivery is billed separately: Rs 14 crore of FY24 revenue came specifically from delivery services, meaning the company charges for logistics on top of food rather than folding it entirely into the menu price.
• Raw materials are the single biggest cost: material procurement (rice, meat, spices, packaging) cost Rs 111 crore in FY24, up 16.8 percent from Rs 95 crore in FY23, and roughly 41 percent of that year’s revenue.
• Labour costs were cut, not grown: employee benefit expenses fell 11.4 percent to Rs 70 crore in FY24 from Rs 79 crore in FY23, even as revenue rose, one driver of the narrower loss.
• Marketing spend was also trimmed: advertising expenses fell about 15.2 percent year-on-year in FY24, suggesting the brand leaned on repeat orders rather than paid acquisition to grow.
• The part people get wrong: the name suggests mass, bulk cooking, but the entire model rests on the opposite, dum-cooking each handi to order rather than pre-cooking in large batches for reheating, which is precisely why it costs more to run than a standard cloud kitchen.

The numbers

Figures below are revenue from operations and net loss as reported in the company’s financial filings, reviewed by Entrackr and Inc42. Unit: Rs crore.

• Total FY24 expenditure: Rs 346 crore, against Rs 321 crore in FY23, meaning the company spent about Rs 1.29 for every rupee of revenue it earned in FY24.
• EBITDA: a loss of roughly Rs 51 crore in FY24, against revenue of Rs 268 crore, an improvement in scale even though the business stayed cash-negative at the operating level.
• Cash position: Rs 83 crore in cash and bank balances at FY24-end, against Rs 115 crore of current assets, the buffer that let the company keep expanding without an immediate fresh round.

Where the money comes from

• Product mix: biryani and its adjacent curries/kebabs/kormas drove 94.76% of FY24 revenue (Rs 254 crore); the remaining 5.24% (Rs 14 crore) came from delivery charges billed as a separate line.
• Channel mix: the brand sells through its own app and website, through Swiggy and Zomato, and, since scaling past 100 outlets, increasingly through dine-in restaurants rather than delivery-only kitchens alone, as described in Devyani’s April 2025 acquisition filing.
• Geographic footprint: over 100 outlets across more than 40 Indian cities at the time of the Devyani deal, up from 18 outlets in a single city cluster (Gurugram-led NCR) as recently as March 2019.
• The surprise: despite the “cloud kitchen” label the brand is popularly known by, its scale today rests on a hybrid of delivery kitchens and sit-down restaurants, not a delivery-only network, which is also why Devyani, a dine-in and drive-through operator, saw it as a fit rather than a bolt-on.

The risks

• Demand growth on aggregators is slowing: biryani orders on Zomato fell by about 1 crore units year-on-year, and Swiggy’s biryani order growth was only around 1.5 percent between 2023 and 2024, per Finshots’ analysis of aggregator data, at a time when Biryani By Kilo still depends heavily on Swiggy and Zomato for delivery volume.
• Input-cost pressure keeps eating margin: material procurement rose 16.8 percent in FY24 even as the company tried to cut every other cost line, meaning further increases in chicken, mutton or rice prices flow straight through to an already-negative EBITDA.
• Integration risk under a listed parent: now a subsidiary of Devyani, a company that answers to public markets every quarter, Biryani By Kilo faces pressure that could push it toward standardisation and faster unit economics at the cost of the founder-led positioning that built the brand.
• A better-funded direct competitor: Rebel Foods, which runs the rival Behrouz Biryani brand out of its cloud-kitchen network and has been preparing for a public listing, gives Biryani By Kilo a rival with comparable or greater scale in the same category.

The takeaway

Biryani By Kilo’s arc is a reminder that revenue growth and rising valuation are not the same story. The company did almost everything a growth playbook asks: it found a genuine product insight, survived a near-fatal funding gap, expanded to dozens of cities, and cut its losses by nearly a third in its most recent reported year. None of that stopped its price from falling by the time a buyer with a real distribution network showed up. The lesson transfers well beyond biryani: in a business with structurally thin margins, being loved by customers and grown by venture capital is not the same as being worth more each year, and the eventual buyer, not the last funding round, decides what the growth was actually worth.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Biryani By Kilo?

Vishal Jindal, Kaushik Roy and Ritesh Sinha founded Biryani By Kilo in May 2015 in Gurugram. Jindal came from private equity, Roy from two decades of foodservice operations, and Sinha became the company’s COO.

Who owns Biryani By Kilo now?

Since April 2025, Devyani International, the listed operator of KFC, Pizza Hut and Costa Coffee in India, owns a controlling 80.72 percent stake in Sky Gate Hospitality, Biryani By Kilo’s parent company, making it a Devyani subsidiary.

How much money has Biryani By Kilo raised?

The company had raised roughly $55 million across its Series A (2019, $5 million, led by IvyCap Ventures), Series B (2021, $35 million, led by Falcon Edge Capital) and Series C (2023, $9 million, led by Alpha Wave Ventures) before Devyani’s acquisition.

Is Biryani By Kilo profitable?

No. It reported a net loss of Rs 71 crore on revenue of Rs 268 crore in FY24, though that loss was 29.7 percent narrower than FY23’s Rs 101 crore loss on Rs 218 crore of revenue.

What makes Biryani By Kilo’s biryani different?

Each order is dum-cooked individually in its own handi rather than reheated from a large batch, and delivered with a small earthen angeethi so the customer can warm the dish just before eating, a process designed to survive delivery without losing restaurant-style texture and flavour.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Entrackr, “Biryani By Kilo reports Rs 268 Cr revenue in FY24, cuts losses by 30%,” November 2024
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: Biryani By Kilo raises $9 Mn in a new round,” December 2023
• Inc42, “Biryani by Kilo’s Loss Jumps 2.7X To INR 42.6 Cr In FY22, Sales Rise To INR 133 Cr,” 2022
• Forbes India, “How Vishal Jindal is building disruptive Biryani By Kilo into a favoured national brand,” 2024
• Business Standard, “Devyani International to acquire majority stake in ‘Biryani by Kilo’,” April 2025
• India Infoline, “Devyani International to Acquire 81% Stake in Biryani By Kilo Parent for Rs 419 Crore,” April 2025
• BestMediaInfo, “Devyani International to acquire 80.72% stake in ‘Biryani By Kilo’ operator for Rs 419.6 crore,” April 2025
• Business Upturn, “Devyani International to acquire 80.72% stake in ‘Biryani by Kilo’ parent Sky Gate for Rs 419 crore,” April 2025
• Storyboard18, “KFC, Pizza Hut operator Devyani International plans to acquire Biryani By Kilo,” April 2025
• Finshots, “Devyani wants a seat at the biryani banquet,” April 2025
• American Bazaar, “After surviving Covid, Indian start-up Biryani by Kilo is finally set to enter US market,” March 2021

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