Startup Deep Dive : Curefoods — the healthy-food startup earning more from biryani than salads

Curefoods calls itself a healthy-food company, built around EatFit, the brand its founder once ran inside Curefit. Yet by the year ended March 2026, EatFit’s category was shrinking, while a biryani label the company had bought off someone else, Sharief Bhai, had grown into the single largest source of its Rs 916 crore ($95.4 million) in annual revenue.

Curefoods was cleared by SEBI to list on India’s stock exchanges in October 2025. Eight months later, in June 2026, it walked away from its own initial public offering, after institutional investors balked at the roughly Rs 4,000 crore price tag on a business that has never once turned a profit.

Quick facts

What they do

Curefoods does not run one restaurant chain. It runs a portfolio of them. The company buys or takes majority control of food brands that already have a following in a city or a category, then plugs them into its own kitchens, delivery operations and supply chain so they can be sold in more places at once. Its house of brands spans healthy meals (EatFit), biryani (Sharief Bhai), desserts and bakes (CakeZone, Frozen Bottle), pizza (Olio Pizza, Nomad Pizza) and, since 2024 and 2025, the Indian rights to the American doughnut and coffee chain Krispy Kreme. As of March 2025 the company said it ran five central kitchens, 281 cloud kitchens, 99 kiosks, 122 dine-in restaurants and 13 warehouses, reaching more than 500 service locations across over 70 Indian cities and towns, according to its draft red herring prospectus (DRHP) cited by Inc42.

The origin

Ankit Nagori cold-emailed Flipkart’s founders at a book fair and joined the company as its 22nd employee; within six years he had risen to chief business officer, according to Entrepreneur India. He left Flipkart in 2016 to co-found Curefit, a wellness venture, with Myntra founder Mukesh Bansal. Curefit built a cluster of fitness and food brands, including a food-delivery vertical called EatFit. In 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, Curefit spun EatFit out as an independent company under Nagori, and Curefoods was born.

The insight was not a new recipe or a new app. It was a bet on consolidation. India’s food-delivery boom had produced hundreds of small, single-city cloud-kitchen brands that could cook well but could not scale: they lacked capital for real estate, could not standardise packaging and delivery timing, and had no leverage with aggregators. Nagori’s plan, described by BusinessToday as a Thrasio-style playbook borrowed from the roll-up model used on Amazon marketplace brands, was to buy these brands outright, keep their names and recipes, and run them all through one shared network of kitchens, staff and technology. Scale, not any single dish, was meant to be the product.

The struggle years

The first six months were brutal by any measure. Between its incorporation in October 2020 and March 2021, the newly independent Curefoods generated just Rs 1.96 crore in revenue, according to figures Entrackr reported in January 2023, as pandemic lockdowns hollowed out food delivery and dine-in alike.

Growth returned, but so did the losses. In FY22 revenue reached Rs 89.1 crore, but the company lost Rs 71.25 crore doing it, spending roughly Rs 1.85 to earn every rupee of revenue, an EBITDA margin of about -56%, per Entrackr’s reporting on the company’s filings. The acquisition spree that followed made the arithmetic worse before it got better. In FY23, as Curefoods added brands such as The Gravy Company, Olio’s Pizza and Sharief Bhai to its stable, revenue nearly doubled to Rs 382 crore, but the net loss ballooned to Rs 342.7 crore, almost matching revenue rupee for rupee, with an EBITDA margin of -72% and advertising spend alone touching Rs 107.4 crore, according to Inc42’s analysis of the company’s FY24 filings.

Underneath the financial swings sat a harder, ongoing problem: keeping people. Curefoods’ DRHP disclosed permanent-employee attrition of 116.6% in FY23, 127.7% in FY24 and 111.7% in FY25, meaning the company effectively had to replace more than its entire workforce every single year for three years running, as reported by Inc42. A roll-up strategy depends on integrating dozens of small teams into one culture; that attrition record suggests the integration was never smooth. Separately, the DRHP disclosed multiple notices from municipal and food-safety authorities and pending criminal cases tied to hygiene and operations lapses at outlets in Delhi and Noida, a real hazard for any operator running hundreds of kitchens under many different brand names at once.

The turning point

The pivot came in FY24, the year to March 2024, and it was a change in discipline rather than a single headline event. Facing a loss that had nearly swallowed a full year of revenue, Curefoods cut advertising and promotional spending by roughly half, to Rs 52.8 crore from Rs 107.4 crore, and slowed the pace of new brand acquisitions. The results showed up immediately: revenue grew 53% to Rs 585.1 crore, while the net loss nearly halved to Rs 172.6 crore and the EBITDA margin swung from -72% to -14%, according to Inc42’s reporting on the FY24 numbers. Put the two years side by side: in FY23, Curefoods lost roughly 90 paise for every rupee of revenue; by FY24, that had fallen to roughly 30 paise. The company had proved it could grow and rein in losses in the same year, not just one or the other.

That new discipline gave Curefoods the confidence to make its highest-profile bet yet. On 13 May 2025, it acquired the pan-India rights to Krispy Kreme, taking full control of an international brand it had previously only operated in parts of the country, and inheriting more than 100 outlets nationally, per Entrepreneur India’s report. It was a wager that the same shared-kitchen model that had scaled biryani and pizza brands could carry a premium global franchise too.

The money behind it

Curefoods had raised about $128 million by January 2023 and was valued at roughly $390-395 million following a Series C round in June 2022 backed by Iron Pillar, Chiratae Ventures and Accel, alongside Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal, according to Entrackr. That capital funded the early acquisition wave. In 2023, Binny Bansal’s family office, 3 State Ventures, invested Rs 240 crore and became Curefoods’ largest external shareholder at 17.32%, per Inc42’s analysis of the DRHP, effectively becoming the company’s most important financial backstop through its loss-making years. The same investor led a further Rs 160 crore pre-IPO placement in September 2025, priced at Rs 124 a share, that kept the company funded as its listing timeline slipped.

Curefoods filed its DRHP with SEBI seeking to raise Rs 800 crore through a fresh issue, alongside an offer for sale of about 4.85 crore shares from early investors including Iron Pillar, Accel India, Chiratae Ventures and Crimson Winter; founder Ankit Nagori chose not to sell any shares in the offer, per Entrackr. SEBI issued its observations, effectively a green light, around October 2025. Then, in early June 2026, Curefoods shelved the IPO after roadshows failed to win support from mutual funds and other institutional investors at the roughly Rs 4,000 crore (about $450-480 million) valuation it was seeking, a level well above what its persistent losses could easily justify, as reported by both Reuters (via Investing.com) and Verdict Foodservice. Both reports said the company intends to revisit a listing in 2027 if market conditions improve.

How it makes money

Money comes in almost entirely from selling food: in FY26, food and product sales made up about 99% of Curefoods’ operating income, at Rs 908.4 crore, per Entrackr’s reporting on the company’s FY26 filings. Most of that is still sold through delivery aggregators rather than direct channels; Inc42’s reporting put aggregator-routed sales at 85.6% of cloud-kitchen revenue, with Swiggy and Zomato charging commissions of roughly 18-22% on every order. That commission is the first, largest bite out of revenue before Curefoods sees a rupee of it.

On the cost side, raw ingredients (cost of materials) came to about Rs 273 crore in FY25, a manageable share of revenue on paper. The real strain sits elsewhere: employee costs of about Rs 180 crore, aggregator commissions of about Rs 137 crore, and advertising that rose 64% year on year to Rs 87 crore in FY25 just to keep newly folded-in brands visible on delivery apps, according to Entrackr’s FY25 breakdown. The part outsiders often get wrong is treating Curefoods like a technology company with software-like margins. Its own disclosed unit economics say otherwise: Rs 1.27 spent for every Re 1 of operating revenue in FY25, an EBITDA margin of around -7.5% that year, improving to about -7.6% in FY26. It behaves less like an app and more like a food manufacturer with a delivery bill layered on top, where scale lowers the cost of running each brand but has not yet been enough to cover marketing and platform commissions.

The numbers

Revenue has climbed every year since FY22, at a pace far ahead of traditional quick-service restaurant chains, which typically grow 10-20% a year, per Inc42. But FY26 is a reminder that the turnaround was partial, not complete: the net loss widened again, to Rs 192 crore from Rs 170 crore, even as the EBITDA loss narrowed to about Rs 69.3 crore from Rs 86 crore, according to Entrackr’s FY26 report. Cash and bank balances fell 51% during the year, to Rs 39.4 crore from about Rs 80.8 crore, and current assets dropped 21% to Rs 267.7 crore, the same report said, precisely the moment the IPO that was meant to refill the balance sheet got shelved.

Where the money comes from

Curefoods reports its business two ways: by category and by brand. By category in FY25, desserts were the fastest grower, up 95% year on year to Rs 196 crore, and pizza grew 18% to Rs 183 crore. Indian meals brought in Rs 178 crore. Healthy meals, the category anchored by EatFit, the brand the company was originally built around, actually shrank 13% to Rs 176 crore, according to Entrackr’s FY25 breakdown. By brand, Sharief Bhai (Rs 148 crore) and EatFit (Rs 145 crore) together made up close to 40% of FY25 revenue, and the top four brands accounted for roughly 70% of it, per Inc42’s reporting, with CakeZone contributing Rs 102 crore and the newly acquired Krispy Kreme adding Rs 15 crore in its first partial year.

That is the surprise in the numbers: a company that markets itself around healthy eating now earns more from biryani and desserts than from its flagship diet-food brand. Geography tells a similar story of a business still overwhelmingly domestic. India brought in Rs 893.3 crore of Curefoods’ Rs 916.2 crore FY26 revenue, while sales from overseas markets, though still tiny, grew fourfold to Rs 22.85 crore, per Entrackr’s FY26 report.

The risks

The first risk is structural: Curefoods does not control its own shelf. With 85.6% of cloud-kitchen sales flowing through Swiggy and Zomato at 18-22% commission, per Inc42, the two aggregators effectively set the terms of discovery, pricing and delivery economics for most of what the company sells, leaving little room for Curefoods to build direct customer relationships that would let it keep more of each order.

The second is people. Three consecutive years of permanent-employee attrition above 100%, as disclosed in the company’s own DRHP, is not a rounding error; it means the workforce turns over faster than once a year, which is a hard foundation on which to integrate 17-odd acquired brands into one operating culture, and the company itself names this as a risk to future growth.

The third is liquidity, sharpened by the shelved IPO. Cash and bank balances fell 51% in FY26 to Rs 39.4 crore, and current assets fell 21% to Rs 267.7 crore, according to Entrackr, right as the Rs 800 crore the DRHP earmarked for kitchen expansion, debt repayment and marketing failed to materialise. Unless market conditions improve enough for the 2027 relisting both Reuters and Verdict Foodservice reported the company is targeting, Curefoods will have to fund its next phase of growth from a thinner cash cushion than it had a year earlier.

The takeaway

Buying growth is faster than building it, but it does not make the arithmetic of food any kinder. Curefoods proved a roll-up of small, well-loved food brands could scale revenue past Rs 900 crore in six years, faster than most single-brand restaurant chains manage. What it has not yet proved is that the model produces a profit once the acquisitions slow down and the aggregator commissions, advertising and staff turnover are paid for. The lesson for any founder attracted to a consolidation playbook is that assembling brands is the easy half; the harder half is the unglamorous discipline of unit economics, retention and cash management that decides whether the combined company is actually worth more than the sum of what it paid for the parts.

Frequently asked questions

What is Curefoods and what does it sell?

Curefoods is a Bengaluru-based multi-brand food company that owns and operates cloud kitchens, kiosks and restaurants under brands including EatFit, Sharief Bhai, CakeZone, Olio Pizza and the Indian rights to Krispy Kreme, selling meals, desserts, pizza and baked goods mainly through food-delivery apps.

Who founded Curefoods and when?

Ankit Nagori, a former Flipkart chief business officer and co-founder of the wellness venture Curefit, founded Curefoods in 2020 when Curefit’s EatFit vertical was spun out as an independent company.

Is Curefoods profitable?

No. Curefoods has posted a net loss every year since at least FY22, most recently Rs 192 crore in FY26 on revenue of Rs 916.2 crore, though its EBITDA loss has narrowed as a share of revenue since its worst year, FY23.

Did Curefoods go public?

Not yet. SEBI cleared its draft IPO papers in October 2025, but Curefoods shelved the Rs 800 crore listing in June 2026 after institutional investors would not support its sought valuation of roughly Rs 4,000 crore, with reports saying the company may revisit a listing in 2027.

What are Curefoods’ most valuable brands?

By FY25 revenue, Sharief Bhai and EatFit were its two largest brands, together contributing close to 40% of revenue, followed by CakeZone and the newly acquired Krispy Kreme.

Sources

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

• Inc42, “IPO-Bound Curefoods’ FY25 Loss Almost Flat At INR 170 Cr”, July 2025
• Entrackr, “Curefoods posts Rs 746 Cr revenue in FY25, dessert-led income grows 95%”, July 2025
• Entrackr, “Curefoods files DRHP to raise Rs 800 crore in fresh issue, founder Ankit Nagori to skip OFS”, 2025
• Inc42, “Curefoods’ IPO Recipe & The Cloud Kitchen Conundrum”, 2025
• Inc42, “Curefoods DRHP: Shareholding Pattern And Top Deck Decode”, 2025
• Inc42, “Curefoods’ FY24 Loss Halves To INR 173 Cr”, 2024
• Entrackr, “Unpacking Curefoods’ scale through numbers”, January 2023
• BusinessToday, “India’s coolest start ups: How Ankit Nagori turned Curefoods into a formidable brand”, January 2024
• Entrackr, “Curefoods reports Rs 916 Cr revenue and Rs 192 Cr loss in FY26”, September 2026
• Inc42, “Curefoods’ Employee Problem: Over 100% Attrition Rate For 3 Years”, 2025
• Investing.com (via Reuters/Economic Times), “India’s Curefoods shelves IPO plans amid valuation concerns”, June 2026
• Verdict Foodservice, “Curefoods postpones IPO plan amid market volatility”, June 2026
• Entrepreneur India, “Ankit Nagori: The Digital Foodpreneur”
• Entrepreneur India, “Curefoods Acquires National Rights for Krispy Kreme”, May 2025

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