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Startup Deep Dive : Rebel Foods — it runs 45 restaurant brands and has lost money every year on record

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The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for Rebel Foods.

Rebel Foods calls itself the world’s largest internet restaurant company, and the description is not marketing gloss so much as a category it had to invent. It runs more than 450 kitchens across over 45 brands that nobody has ever walked into, cooking Faasos wraps, Behrouz biryani and Oven Story pizza out of the same back-of-house space. In FY26, the year to March 2026, that machine produced ₹1,951.6 crore ($203 million) in revenue, up 21% on the year before, and still lost ₹281.8 crore, as per figures reported by Entrackr in September 2026.

That is the contradiction sitting at the centre of this piece: a company fourteen years old, backed by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund and Singapore’s Temasek, valued at $1.4 billion on paper, preparing what its own executives describe as an imminent public listing — and it has not produced a profit in any of the five most recent fiscal years for which numbers exist. Understanding why requires going back to a roll shop in Pune and a founder who missed home-cooked egg rolls badly enough to start selling them.

Quick facts

Company Rebel Foods Private Limited
Founded 24 September 2011, Pune (as Faasos; renamed Rebel Foods in 2018)
Founder(s) Jaydeep Barman and Kallol Banerjee
Businesses Multi-brand cloud kitchens (Faasos, Behrouz Biryani, Oven Story, Lunch Box, The Good Bowl, Sweet Truth, Smoor), the EatSure ordering app, and the Wendy’s India franchise
Latest FY revenue ₹1,951.6 crore, FY26 (year to March 2026)
Latest FY profit/loss Net loss of ₹281.8 crore, FY26
Listed Private; an IPO has been flagged for 2026 but no date is confirmed
Market value / last valuation $1.4 billion, reported at its December 2024 Series G (primary price; secondary shares in the same round reportedly changed hands at a steep discount)
Key shareholders / CEO Ankush Grover, Global CEO since July 2025; backers include Sequoia Capital, Qatar Investment Authority, Coatue, Temasek and KKR

What they do

Rebel Foods does not run restaurants in the way most people picture the word. It runs kitchens, and out of each kitchen it runs several restaurants at once, each one a brand with its own app listing, menu and marketing, but sharing the same stove, the same delivery staff and the same back-end software. A customer ordering a Behrouz biryani and a friend ordering an Oven Story pizza three streets away may both be eating food cooked in the same building, by the same crew, without either of them knowing it. The company also runs EatSure, its own ordering app built to pull customers away from Zomato and Swiggy, and it holds the Indian franchise for Wendy’s, running the US chain’s dine-in and delivery stores domestically. The customer is anyone ordering delivery food in urban India, and increasingly in Dubai, Indonesia and the UK, where Rebel now runs a smaller but faster-growing slice of kitchens.

The origin

The idea did not start as a technology business. In 2004, Jaydeep Barman, then working at an e-learning company, missed the Kolkata-style egg rolls of home and opened a small roll counter in Pune with his colleague Kallol Banerjee, calling it Faasos. Both men then left to do MBAs at INSEAD; Barman went on to McKinsey in London and Banerjee to Bosch in Singapore, before the two returned to India to build the chain properly. Rebel Foods was incorporated on 24 September 2011, and in October that year the founders raised $5 million from Sequoia Capital to expand Faasos as a conventional quick-service chain with dine-in counters and online ordering bolted on. The founding insight, though, came later and from their own order data rather than from any grand plan: the founders were building a restaurant chain and slowly discovering that most of their customers had stopped coming to see it.

The struggle years

By 2014 and 2015, Faasos was a mid-sized quick-service chain carrying the costs that come with that shape: high-street rent, full front-of-house staff, and outlets designed for people who would sit down. Those costs were rising faster than the dine-in business could justify, and the format was capital-intensive to scale city by city. The company’s own account of that period, recounted since in founder interviews and industry retrospectives, is that roughly seven in ten Faasos orders by then were coming from customers who had never set foot in a single outlet — they only ever saw the food arrive at their door. Carrying expensive real estate for a customer base that overwhelmingly ordered online was, on the company’s own numbers, an unsustainable position, and it forced the closure of dine-in space that had defined the business since 2004.

The pressure did not end with that pivot. Losses kept widening even after the model changed: Rebel Foods’ net loss grew from ₹534.2 crore in FY22 to ₹656.5 crore in FY23, a jump that outpaced the 39% revenue growth over the same period, as reported by Inc42. And in September 2026, with an IPO reportedly in view, the company shut QuickiES, its own 15-minute quick-commerce delivery bet launched to compete with Zomato and Swiggy’s instant-delivery pushes, citing cash-burn concerns, according to Entrackr’s reporting carried by RetailIntel. Fourteen years in, Rebel Foods was still cutting back initiatives it could not afford to keep funding.

The turning point

The single event that reshaped the company was the 2015-16 decision to close dine-in Faasos outlets and convert the business entirely to delivery-only, cloud kitchens, completed by 2016. Before the shift, the company was carrying full restaurant overheads — rent, front-of-house wages, seating — against a customer base that, by its own data, barely used those outlets in person. After the shift, Rebel Foods says fixed overheads such as rent and staffing fell by roughly 30%, and topline grew from about ₹4 crore in 2012 to ₹62 crore in 2016, according to figures the company has shared in retrospectives of its own history. The pivot also reframed what the company was for good: instead of one restaurant chain trying to survive on delivery margins, it became a kitchen-operating platform that could launch new food brands cheaply, since a new brand no longer needed its own building, only its own listing on a shared kitchen’s menu. That is the structural bet the entire current business — 45-plus brands, one kitchen network — is built on.

The money behind it

Rebel Foods has raised roughly $800 million across more than twenty rounds since that 2011 Sequoia cheque, according to Inc42’s funding tracker. Three backers mark the clearest turns in that story. Sequoia Capital wrote the founding $5 million cheque in 2011 that let Faasos become a multi-city chain in the first place. Qatar Investment Authority led the $175 million Series F in October 2021 that valued the company at $1.4 billion and made it India’s 32nd unicorn that year, with Coatue and Evolvence also participating, as reported at the time by TechCrunch and Business Today. And Temasek led a $210 million Series G in December 2024, explicitly described by the company as pre-IPO funding, with KKR buying in through a secondary transaction in the same round.

The Series G is also where the valuation story gets complicated. Business Standard and Entrackr both reported at the time that the round’s primary shares were priced at a flat $1.4 billion — unchanged from 2021 — while a portion of the round was structured as secondary sales at a reported discount of roughly 50%, implying a real-money valuation closer to $700-800 million for sellers who wanted out. Rebel Foods has not published a valuation since; both the $1.4 billion headline figure and the lower secondary-sale mark are on the record, and neither has been superseded by a newer, cleaner number.

How it makes money

Almost all of Rebel Foods’ revenue, about 97% in recent years, comes from selling food directly to consumers under its own and partner brands, not from charging other restaurants to use its kitchens, which is the part outsiders most often get wrong. It is easy to mistake Rebel Foods for a landlord renting out kitchen space, the way WeWork rented desks; in practice it is closer to a conglomerate that owns and operates the restaurants itself, using a shared kitchen only to keep the fixed-cost base low. Money comes in through its own EatSure app and, more heavily, through Zomato and Swiggy, where Rebel pays commission rather than earning it. That commission is the single biggest drag on margin: in FY25, brokerage and commission paid to aggregators came to ₹243 crore, nearly as much as the company’s entire employee cost of ₹388 crore, according to Entrackr’s review of its filings. Cost of raw materials was the largest line item at ₹678.5 crore, about a third of total expenses. On a unit basis, Rebel Foods spent ₹1.23 to earn every ₹1 of revenue in FY25, an improvement on ₹1.31 in FY24, which is the clearest evidence yet that its path to profit runs through cutting that gap further rather than growing revenue faster.

The numbers

Revenue has grown every year since at least FY22, and losses have narrowed for three straight years after peaking in FY23, though the company has yet to report a profit in any year for which financials are public.

Fiscal year Revenue (₹ crore) Net loss (₹ crore)
FY23 1,195.2 656.5
FY24 1,420.0 378.0
FY25 1,617.4 336.6
FY26 1,951.6 281.8

Sources: Inc42 (FY23), Entrackr and Business Standard (FY24), Entrackr and Inc42 (FY25), Entrackr via RetailIntel (FY26). One reconciliation note: Inc42’s December 2025 report on FY25 cites a restated FY24 base loss of ₹380.3 crore rather than the ₹378 crore first reported by Entrackr in August 2024 — both figures are on record and the gap is small. EBITDA loss followed the same direction, narrowing from ₹127.6 crore in FY25 to ₹105.7 crore in FY26, a margin of roughly -5.4% in the latest year, per Inc42 and Entrackr respectively.

Where the money comes from

India still supplies the overwhelming majority of revenue, but it is no longer where Rebel Foods is growing fastest. In FY26, India brought in ₹1,667.7 crore, or 85.5% of the total, up 18% year on year. The rest of the world — chiefly the UK, the Middle East and Indonesia, where Rebel runs kitchens in Dubai and London among other cities — brought in ₹283.8 crore, smaller in absolute terms but up 39% year on year, more than double India’s growth rate, according to Entrackr’s FY26 breakdown. The surprise is not that India dominates a company headquartered in Mumbai; it is that a business built on Indian food brands and an Indian delivery-aggregator relationship is now expanding faster abroad than at home, suggesting the kitchen-sharing model travels even when the specific menus do not.

The risks

The clearest risk is structural dependence on two companies it does not control. More than half of Rebel Foods’ orders arrive through Zomato and Swiggy, which charge commissions that industry commentary puts in the 20-35% range per order; Rebel’s own ₹243 crore brokerage-and-commission line in FY25 shows how much of its cost base sits outside its own hands. If either platform raises take rates or favours its own kitchen brands, Rebel’s margins move with someone else’s decision.

The second risk is that the aggregators it depends on are now the ones proving cloud-kitchen economics can work, while Rebel and its peers have not yet closed that gap. Zomato and Swiggy have both reported operating profitability in recent periods, while the largest standalone cloud-kitchen operators, Rebel Foods included, remain loss-making, a contrast that has been drawn explicitly in industry commentary on the sector. That undercuts the original thesis that scale and shared kitchens alone would produce the lower cost base needed to win.

The third risk is capital and cash. Cash and bank balances stood at just ₹56 crore at the end of FY25 before the position was rebuilt to ₹112 crore in FY26, a thin cushion for a company still burning ₹100 crore-plus a year at the EBITDA line. The December 2024 round’s discounted secondary sales are a visible sign that at least some existing investors valued an exit over holding at the $1.4 billion headline mark, which is not a reassuring signal to carry into an IPO process.

The takeaway

The lesson Rebel Foods offers is not about food, it is about what happens after a good structural insight stops being enough on its own. Splitting a kitchen’s fixed costs across many delivery-only brands was a genuinely clever answer to the dine-in cash bleed of 2015, and it is the reason the company survived to raise money from sovereign wealth funds a decade later. But a lower cost structure only wins if the thing sitting between the business and its customer — in this case, food-delivery aggregators charging a third of every order — does not simply absorb the saving. Rebel Foods cut its per-rupee cost of doing business for three straight years and still has not turned a profit, which is the clearest sign that the next constraint to solve is not inside its kitchens at all.

Frequently asked questions

What does Rebel Foods do?

It operates delivery-only “cloud kitchens” out of which it runs more than 45 food brands, including Faasos, Behrouz Biryani and Oven Story, plus its own ordering app EatSure and the Wendy’s franchise in India.

Is Rebel Foods profitable?

No. It reported a net loss of ₹281.8 crore in FY26 on revenue of ₹1,951.6 crore, its fourth consecutive year of losses in the financials reviewed for this piece, though the loss has narrowed each year since FY23.

How much is Rebel Foods worth?

It was valued at $1.4 billion in its December 2024 Series G on a primary-share basis, but secondary shares in the same round reportedly traded at close to a 50% discount to that figure, so the two numbers on record differ sharply.

Is Rebel Foods going public?

The company has said it is preparing for an IPO, with a leadership reshuffle in July 2025 that moved cofounder Ankush Grover into the global CEO role widely read as part of that preparation, but no listing date has been confirmed.

Who founded Rebel Foods?

Jaydeep Barman and Kallol Banerjee, who started the business as a single egg-roll counter called Faasos in Pune in 2004 before incorporating Rebel Foods in 2011 and converting the chain to a cloud-kitchen model by 2016.

Sources

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

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