Licious spent a decade convincing India that chicken should arrive the way milk does — cold, clean, and on time. By FY25 that bet was a ₹795 crore ($83 million) business, as per figures reported by Entrackr in October 2025 — and it was still losing money, ₹218.3 crore that year alone.
That contradiction sits at the centre of the Licious story: a company that built India’s first organised, full-stack cold chain for meat and seafood, became the country’s first direct-to-consumer unicorn in 2021, and then spent the following three years cutting its losses by double digits every single year just to stay in the room for an initial public offering it once hoped to complete by 2026.
Quick facts
| Company | Licious, operated by Delightful Gourmet Pvt Ltd |
| Founded | 2015, Bengaluru |
| Founders | Abhay Hanjura and Vivek Gupta |
| Businesses | Direct-to-consumer fresh meat, seafood, ready-to-cook and ready-to-eat products, sold via its own app and website, quick commerce marketplaces, and 50-plus offline stores |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹795 crore in FY25, up 16 percent year-on-year (Entrackr, October 2025) |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Net loss of ₹218.3 crore in FY25, down 27 percent from FY24 (Inc42, November 2025) |
| Listed | Private; an IPO was targeted for 2026 as of a February 2025 report, with the timeline later described as under review |
| Market value / last valuation | $1.5 billion at its last funding round in 2023 (reported); IPO valuation target of over $2 billion (Business Standard and Vertex Ventures, both February 2025) |
| Key shareholders / CEO | Co-founder Vivek Gupta is CEO; Mayfield India is the largest shareholder at 14.69 percent, with Temasek, Vertex Growth Fund, IIFL AMC, Bertelsmann India Investments and 3one4 Capital among other backers (Entrackr, October 2025) |
What they do
Licious sells fresh chicken, mutton, seafood, eggs, and a growing line of marinated, ready-to-cook and ready-to-eat products, straight to households in India’s cities. It is not a marketplace that lists other people’s meat shops; it runs the whole chain itself — buying live birds and fish from farmers and fishermen, processing and packing them in its own FSSAI-certified facilities, and delivering through its own cold-chain logistics. Customers reach it through the Licious app and website, through quick commerce marketplaces such as Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy Instamart, and increasingly through physical stores. By FY25, the company said it served more than 1.2 million monthly customers across 20 cities, with online channels contributing more than 85 percent of revenue (Entrackr, October 2025).
The origin
The idea did not come from a market study. As per the founders’ own retelling, reported by Startuppedia in 2025, Abhay Hanjura was planning a dinner for friends in Bengaluru and could not find chicken he trusted enough to serve. Hanjura, who had a background in biotechnology, and Vivek Gupta, a finance professional, had both built careers away from food retail, but the failed dinner became a diagnostic moment: if two educated, financially comfortable, urban consumers could not reliably buy clean, fresh meat in India’s own tech capital, the problem was systemic, not personal. India was — and remains — one of the world’s largest meat-consuming and meat-exporting nations, with close to 70 percent of the population eating meat, yet the trade was almost entirely unorganised, running through wet markets with no visibility into animal welfare, slaughter hygiene, storage temperature or how old the cut on the counter actually was. Hanjura and Gupta quit their jobs in 2015 and started Licious out of a roughly 3,000 sq ft unit in Bangalore, filling around 100 orders a day, according to Inc42’s account of the company’s early supply-chain build-out. From day one they chose the harder path: instead of aggregating existing butchers, they trained their own, built cold storage, and set a brand promise — never frozen, always fresh — that forced them to own logistics most food-tech companies would rather rent.
The struggle years
The hardest stretch was not the startup years; it was after Licious had already raised serious money. Flush with a $150 million round in March 2022 that made it India’s best-funded meat-tech company, Licious scaled aggressively through the pandemic-era demand spike, and the reckoning showed up in the accounts. Total expenses reached roughly ₹1,187 crore against revenue of about ₹682.5 crore in FY22 — spending nearly ₹1.75 for every rupee earned — a mismatch that produced one of the company’s worst loss years. The exact FY22 net loss figure is itself disputed in Indian startup media: Telangana Today’s February 2024 report on the company’s layoffs put it at ₹855.6 crore, while a separate report from IndianStartupNews put it closer to ₹485 crore on similar revenue; the disagreement between two outlets covering the same regulatory filing is itself a marker of how chaotic that year’s numbers were. What is not disputed is that FY23 revenue landed at roughly ₹746–748 crore — badly missing the company’s own internal target of ₹1,500 crore for the year, according to IndianStartupNews’s February 2024 report. Then came a distribution shock: Dunzo, one of Licious’s third-party delivery channels, shut down operations, and Swiggy Meatstore was wound down, knocking out volume the company did not control and could not quickly replace. Combined with a deliberate retreat from modern trade and general trade stores, this pushed FY24 revenue down 8 percent year-on-year to ₹685 crore even as quick commerce sales through other platforms grew 35 percent, as per Business Standard’s October 2024 report. The company responded in February 2024 by cutting around 80 jobs, roughly 3 percent of its workforce, describing it as a “reprioritising” of cost outlays, per Telangana Today.
The turning point
The turning point was not a single funding event; it was the decision, forced by the FY22 numbers, to stop chasing growth-at-any-cost and start managing the business like a company that would eventually need to show a profit-and-loss statement to public markets. The before-and-after is stark. Before: FY22 expenses of about ₹1,187 crore against revenue of ₹682.5 crore, and a loss that, on the higher of the two disputed estimates, nearly matched full-year revenue. After: by FY25, revenue had grown to ₹795 crore while the net loss had shrunk to ₹218.3 crore and the EBITDA loss had fallen 45 percent year-on-year to ₹163 crore, from ₹296 crore in FY24, as per Entrackr’s October 2025 report. That is three consecutive years of double-digit percentage loss reduction — 44 percent in FY24, then 27 percent in FY25 on net loss, and 45 percent in FY25 on EBITDA loss — achieved partly by cutting advertising spend 24 percent to ₹77.6 crore in FY25 from ₹102.2 crore the year before, per Inc42’s November 2025 report. The company has said it wants to reach EBITDA breakeven, and used that improving trend line to justify going back to investors and the market with IPO ambitions rather than another cash-burn narrative.
The money behind it
Licious has raised over $450 million across more than ten rounds since 2015, according to Entrackr’s October 2025 reporting, a figure broadly consistent with the roughly $450–490 million range tracked by startup-funding databases. Three backers stand out. Mayfield, an early-stage investor, backed Licious well before it was fashionable to bet on meat delivery, partially exited during the 2021 Series F round, and yet — according to Entrackr’s October 2025 report citing regulatory filings — remains the company’s single largest shareholder today at 14.69 percent, a sign of how much of the capital table conviction was built in the earliest years. IIFL AMC’s Late Stage Tech Fund led the $52 million Series G round in October 2021 that pushed Licious’s valuation to roughly $1 billion and made it India’s 30th unicorn and the first D2C brand to reach that status, as reported by TechCrunch and IBEF at the time. Temasek, the Singapore state investor, co-led the earlier $192 million round in July 2021 alongside Multiples Private Equity at a roughly $650 million valuation, per Business Standard’s July 2021 report, and has stayed on the cap table since — its continued backing is the reason recent IPO coverage refers to Licious as “Temasek-backed.” Other participants across rounds have included Vertex Growth Fund, Vertex Ventures, Bertelsmann India Investments, 3one4 Capital and Sistema Asia Fund. The company’s last disclosed funding round, in 2023, valued it at $1.5 billion, according to both Business Standard and Vertex Ventures reporting from February 2025 — the figure Licious is now trying to roughly grow towards a targeted $2 billion in a planned public listing.
How it makes money
Licious does not run a marketplace take-rate model the way a food delivery app does; it is closer to a vertically integrated manufacturer and retailer rolled into one. Money comes in when a customer buys packaged, cut, cleaned or marinated meat, seafood or a ready-to-cook product, priced with a full retail margin because Licious owns every step between the farm and the doorstep — procurement, processing, packaging, cold storage and, for a large share of orders, last-mile delivery. That full-stack ownership is also where the costs sit: sourcing from more than 5,000 farmers and fishermen, running FSSAI-certified processing centres that put every batch through more than 150 quality checks, and maintaining an unbroken 0–4°C cold chain from slaughter to doorstep. The part outsiders tend to get wrong is treating Licious like a food-delivery app with a thin, asset-light margin structure; in reality it behaves more like an FMCG manufacturer that also owns its own retail channel, which means the margin is potentially larger per unit than a marketplace’s commission, but so is the risk — unsold fresh protein cannot be marked down indefinitely the way a packaged good can, so wastage and forecasting accuracy sit directly on Licious’s own profit-and-loss account rather than being shared with an upstream supplier.
The numbers
Unit: ₹ crore. Figures for FY23–FY25 are drawn from consistent reporting across Business Standard, YourStory, Entrackr and Inc42; the FY22 loss figure is contested between sources and is presented as a range.
| Metric | FY22 | FY23 | FY24 | FY25 |
| Revenue | ~682.5 | ~746–748 | 685 | 795 |
| Net loss | 485–856 (disputed) | 524–528 | 293.8–298.6 | 218.3 |
| EBITDA loss | not disclosed | not disclosed | 296 | 163 |
Two things stand out. First, revenue has not grown in a straight line — it dipped in FY24 on the Dunzo shutdown and modern-trade retreat before recovering in FY25. Second, every loss line has improved every year since FY22, which is the more important trend for a company trying to convince public-market investors it can eventually turn a profit. The momentum has reportedly continued into the current year: H1 FY26 revenue rose 42 percent year-on-year to ₹530 crore, from ₹374 crore in the same period a year earlier, as per Entrackr’s October 2025 report.
Where the money comes from
More than 85 percent of Licious’s FY25 revenue came through online channels — its own app and website plus quick commerce marketplaces — with quick commerce platforms alone contributing roughly a fifth of total revenue, as per Vertex Ventures’ February 2025 report. The surprise is how much weight offline retail now carries for a company that built its brand as an app-first D2C player: Licious operated 50-plus physical stores by FY25, up from just three a year earlier, after acquiring the 23-store Bengaluru chain My Chicken and More in October 2024 in a cash-and-equity deal, per Entrackr’s October 2024 report. That single acquisition was expected to lift Licious’s own Bengaluru sales from about ₹250 crore to ₹400 crore, according to Inc42’s October 2024 coverage of the deal — a reminder that Bengaluru, the company’s home city, still carries an outsized share of its overall business. The company has said it plans to expand to 80–100 stores by the end of FY26, and its ready-to-cook and ready-to-eat range — kebabs, curries, marinated cuts and portion-controlled packs — grew 40 percent in the past year, a segment Licious is leaning on because it carries a longer shelf life and better margins than raw fresh cuts.
The risks
The first risk is channel concentration on partners Licious does not control. The Dunzo shutdown and Swiggy Meatstore wind-down in FY24 were not hypothetical risks — they actually happened, and they cost the company revenue and forced a distribution rebuild, as detailed in Business Standard’s October 2024 report. Roughly a fifth of current revenue running through quick commerce marketplaces such as Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy Instamart repeats that exposure: those platforms set their own commercial terms and, per Vertex Ventures’ February 2025 reporting, some of them — specifically Zepto’s in-house “Relish” meat brand — are simultaneously building competing private-label meat products on the very apps Licious depends on for distribution. Second is the physical nature of the product itself. Fresh meat and seafood cannot be discounted and held the way packaged goods can; a bad monsoon, a disease scare in poultry supply, or a cold-chain failure at any of Licious’s processing centres shows up immediately as spoilage cost, and because the company owns the entire chain rather than sharing it with a supplier, that cost cannot be passed upstream. Third is execution credibility with capital markets: Licious’s own FY23 revenue target of ₹1,500 crore came in at roughly half that, and its IPO timeline — targeted for 2026 in a February 2025 report — has since been described in other coverage as pushed further out, a pattern of missed self-set milestones that any prospective public-market investor will weigh against the improving loss trend.
The takeaway
The lesson in Licious is not “own your supply chain” in the abstract — plenty of founders say that and then build a thin logistics layer on top of someone else’s inventory. It is that owning the full chain, from farmer to fridge, means owning every failure in that chain too, in real time, on your own balance sheet, with a product that cannot wait for a sale to clear. Licious’s multi-year climb from a loss that nearly equalled its revenue to one that is a quarter of it did not come from a single masterstroke; it came from grinding down cost line by cost line — advertising, distribution, channel mix — while a perishable product punished every mistake immediately. Founders building capital-intensive, physical-first businesses in India should read Licious’s FY22 numbers as a warning about what happens when growth capital outruns operational discipline, and its FY25 numbers as the much slower, less glamorous process of earning it back.
Frequently asked questions
Who founded Licious and when?
Licious was founded in 2015 in Bengaluru by Abhay Hanjura and Vivek Gupta, who left corporate careers in biotechnology and finance respectively after struggling to find trustworthy fresh chicken for a dinner party.
Is Licious profitable?
No. Licious reported a net loss of ₹218.3 crore in FY25 on revenue of ₹795 crore, though the loss has narrowed for three consecutive years and the company has targeted EBITDA-level profitability, as per Inc42’s November 2025 and Entrackr’s October 2025 reporting.
What is Licious’s current valuation?
Licious was valued at $1.5 billion at its last disclosed funding round in 2023, and was reportedly targeting a valuation of more than $2 billion for a planned initial public offering, according to Business Standard and Vertex Ventures, both reporting in February 2025.
Is Licious planning an IPO?
As of a February 2025 report, Licious was targeting a stock market listing around 2026 at a valuation above $2 billion; the exact timeline has since been reported elsewhere as under review, and no listing date has been confirmed.
How is Licious different from a food delivery app?
Licious owns its entire supply chain — sourcing from farmers and fishermen, processing in its own certified facilities, and often delivering directly — rather than aggregating listings from third-party meat shops the way a marketplace app would.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Business Standard, “Licious FY24 loss drops by 44%, 3rd party channel closures impact revenue,” October 2024
- YourStory, “Licious pares FY24 losses by 44%; revenue slides 8% to distribution reali…,” October 2024
- Entrackr, “Licious reports Rs 795 Cr revenue in FY25; cuts EBITDA losses by 45%,” October 2025
- Inc42, “Licious Trims FY25 Loss By 27% To INR 218.3 Cr,” November 2025
- Business Standard, “Temasek-backed Licious plans IPO in 2026, targets $2 billion valuation,” February 2025
- Vertex Ventures, “Temasek-backed Licious targets India IPO,” February 2025
- Business Standard, “Licious raises $192 mn from Temasek, others at $650 mn valuation,” July 2021
- TechCrunch, “India’s Licious becomes unicorn with $52 million fresh fundraise,” October 2021
- IBEF, “Licious Becomes India’s 30th Unicorn in 2021; First D2C Startup to Enter The Club,” 2021
- Telangana Today, “Licious lays off 3% of its workforce amid restructuring exercise,” February 2024
- IndianStartupNews, “Meat delivery startup Licious lays off 80 employees; Here’s why,” February 2024
- Entrackr, “Licious acquires My Chicken and More,” October 2024
- Inc42, “Licious Buys Bengaluru’s My Chicken and More To Expand Its Omnichannel Footprint,” October 2024
- Business Standard, “Licious acquires ‘My Chicken and More’ to build Omni-Channel Presence,” October 2024
- Inc42, “From 100 Orders Per Day In 2015 To Over 20,000 In 2021: How Licious Cracked The Supply Chain,” 2021
- Startuppedia, “Licious Started as an Act of Craziness — Meet the Founders of India’s First D2C Meat Unicorn Startup,” 2025
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