In February 2022, the founders of Slurrp Farm told the press they were aiming for ₹500 crore in revenue by 2025. The audited number that eventually showed up in the company’s FY25 filings, as reported by Entrackr: ₹95.6 crore (about $9.96 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) of operating revenue, against a net loss of ₹32.7 crore.
That gap between the target and the filing is not the whole story. It sits alongside a business that survived a pandemic that nearly killed it, built a second brand out of a customer-service observation, and still managed to raise fresh money at a valuation 59% higher than two years earlier. Slurrp Farm, the millet-based kids’ food brand owned by Gurugram-based Wholsum Foods Private Limited, is a case study in how Indian D2C food companies say one number in a press release and file a very different one with the Registrar of Companies.
Quick facts
| Company | Wholsum Foods Private Limited (parent of Slurrp Farm and Millé) |
| Founded | October 2016, Gurugram, Haryana |
| Founder(s) | Meghana Narayan, Shauravi Malik, Umang Bhattacharyya |
| Businesses | Slurrp Farm (millet-based food for children); Millé (plant-protein food for adults, launched June 2023) |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹95.6 crore operating revenue, FY25 (year to March 2025), up about 30% year-on-year (Entrackr, February 2026, citing RoC filings) |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Net loss of ₹32.7 crore, FY25, up 29% year-on-year (Entrackr) |
| Listed | Private (unlisted) |
| Market value / last valuation | About $90 million (₹810 crore, post-money), reported as of the Series C1 round in February 2026 (Entrackr; Indian Retailer) |
| Key shareholders / leadership | Co-founders Meghana Narayan and Shauravi Malik; Fireside Ventures (about 20.7% stake, Thekredible); Anushka Sharma (investor and brand ambassador); Scarlet Ventures (3.7% stake, Entrackr) |
What they do
Wholsum Foods makes packaged food built around millets rather than refined wheat or rice, sold under two brands. Slurrp Farm, the original and larger brand, targets parents of young children with porridges, breakfast cereals, puffed snacks, pancake and dosa mixes, and cake mixes, all formulated without maida or added refined sugar, according to the company’s own product framing reported by Inc42 in April 2022. Millé, launched in June 2023, takes the same millet base and repositions it for adults, with breakfast cereals carrying 17 to 21 grams of plant protein per serving aimed at India’s protein-deficient, diabetes-prone urban consumer, as described in Forbes India’s coverage of the brand’s launch. Products reach customers through the company’s own website, marketplaces such as Amazon, BigBasket and FirstCry, quick-commerce apps including Swiggy Instamart, Blinkit and Zepto, and roughly 5,000 physical stores across 80 Indian cities as of September 2024, per Shauravi Malik’s interview with afaqs. The brand also sells in Nepal, Singapore, the UAE, the UK and the US, per Inc42’s April 2022 report on the company’s distribution footprint.
The origin
Meghana Narayan and Shauravi Malik met in London in 2007, introduced by a mutual friend, according to accounts carried by Women Can Startup and BW Disrupt. Narayan had swum competitively for India, studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and worked at McKinsey on public-health projects. Malik had worked in consumer and retail advisory and leveraged finance at J.P. Morgan, and later as an investment manager at Richard Branson’s Virgin Group. Neither had a food-industry background. The idea came from a personal problem: both were mothers searching supermarket shelves for food for their own children and finding that almost everything aimed at kids was built on wheat or rice, loaded with trans fats and sugar. They started Slurrp Farm in October 2016 on the bet that Indian millets, largely ignored on retail shelves at the time, could be turned into food children would actually eat. A third co-founder, Umang Bhattacharyya, later joined as co-founder and brand director, per Inc42’s company profile.
The struggle years
The first serious brush with failure came from timing, not concept. Slurrp Farm had been running on a roughly even split between brick-and-mortar retail and e-commerce, with about 45 people on staff and monthly revenue of around ₹50 lakh ($68,000 at the time), and the founders had planned to break even in early 2020, according to Al Jazeera’s December 2020 account of the company. India’s nationwide lockdown that March erased that plan within weeks. “April was a no show for us,” Narayan told Al Jazeera, describing revenue that fell to almost nothing as offline retail shut down overnight. The company cut more than half its staff, including most of its offline sales team, closed its physical office, and gave up a newly leased event space it could no longer use. Malik described the decision bluntly: “The hardest part was how to deal with shutting down a business line and the people impact of that. I cried.” The founders also had to repurpose packaging material originally meant for planned UAE exports and pause product lines that were losing money, per the same report.
A second, quieter struggle has played out in public guidance versus private filings. In February 2022, when Wholsum Foods closed a $7 million round led by the Investment Corporation of Dubai, the founders told Agritimes and other outlets they were “currently clocking in over ₹50 crore of revenue run rate, with an aim to reach ₹500 crore in revenue by 2025.” Two months later, in April 2022, Inc42 reported the company’s own stated numbers as a ₹55 crore annual run rate for FY21 and a ₹150 crore target for FY22. The audited FY22 revenue that later surfaced, per Thekredible’s review of the company’s filings, was ₹19.15 crore, with a net loss of roughly ₹19 crore, derived from Thekredible’s reported 1.7-times rise in losses to ₹32.2 crore the following year. Run-rate projections and booked annual revenue are not the same measure, but the scale of the gap between what was said publicly and what was later filed is itself a pattern worth flagging, and it recurs later in the company’s history.
The turning point
Two events, roughly two years apart, mark the shift from a struggling D2C brand to a funded, two-brand company. The first was the COVID-19 pivot itself: forced almost entirely online by the 2020 lockdown, Slurrp Farm partnered with a logistics provider to handle direct fulfilment from its website, leaned into products it could sell without offline sampling, such as millet-based cake mixes, and came out the other side larger than it went in. By the time Al Jazeera reported on the company in December 2020, its revenues were double their pre-COVID peak of about ₹50 lakh a month, even after the mid-2020 collapse. Malik summed up the year as “the best of years and the worst of years.”
The second was Anushka Sharma’s investment. On 18 April 2022, days after the ₹7 crore-scale ICD-led round closed, the Bollywood actor invested an undisclosed amount in Wholsum Foods and signed on as brand ambassador for Slurrp Farm, per Inc42’s report at the time. The financial terms were never disclosed, but the visibility effect was immediate and durable: Sharma remained the face of the brand through the January 2024 Series C and the February 2026 round, and every major funding story about the company since 2022 leads with her name, from Entrackr to Indian Retailer to Startup News. For a category with no natural celebrity hook — millet porridge is not a glamorous product — that association did more to put Slurrp Farm in front of new parents than any single funding round.
The money behind it
Wholsum Foods has raised money across six rounds since 2018, moving from angel backers to institutional venture funds to a Gulf sovereign-linked investor:
- Seed, May 2018: $1 million, led by angel investor Aditya Ghosh (former IndiGo president) with five other backers (Inc42).
- Series A, 22 December 2020: $2 million from Fireside Ventures, the fund’s first check into the company and the start of its largest institutional stake (Inc42; Thekredible).
- Series B, 21 February 2022: about $6.97 million (roughly ₹50 crore at the time), led by the Investment Corporation of Dubai with Fireside Ventures participating, the round that brought in the company’s first sovereign-linked capital and funded its UAE retail push (Inc42; Agritimes).
- Venture round, 18 April 2022: undisclosed amount from Anushka Sharma, who joined as investor and brand ambassador (Inc42).
- Series C, 7 January 2024: $7.21 million (about ₹60 crore), from Alkemi Venture Partners, Raed Capital and existing investor Fireside Ventures, valuing the company at about $63.95 million (₹510 crore) (Inc42; Entrackr).
- Series C1 (extension), February 2026: ₹30 crore (about $3.3 million) from Scarlet Ventures, which took a 3.7% stake through 104,457 preference shares priced at ₹2,872 each, lifting the post-money valuation 59% to about $90 million (₹810 crore) (Entrackr; Indian Retailer).
Inc42 puts total funding at $17.18 million across the first five rounds; the Series C1 extension adds a further ₹30 crore on top of that. Fireside Ventures remains the largest institutional shareholder, holding about 20.7% after the January 2024 round, per Thekredible’s shareholding analysis. The nearly two-year gap between the January 2024 Series C and the February 2026 extension, flagged explicitly by Entrackr as the company’s first capital infusion “in nearly two years,” suggests the round was as much about extending runway against continuing losses as it was about growth capital.
How it makes money
Wholsum Foods is a packaged-goods manufacturer and brand owner, not a marketplace, so there is no take rate to speak of: it earns the retail or online sale price of each pack, minus the cost of ingredients, manufacturing, packaging, logistics and the commission or discount extracted by whichever channel made the sale. That last piece is where the margin story gets complicated. Shauravi Malik told afaqs in September 2024 that quick-commerce platforms and marketplaces such as Amazon now generate comparable revenue for the company, alongside its own website and roughly 5,000 offline retail doors across 80 cities. Quick-commerce and marketplace listings typically carry higher platform commissions and more frequent discounting than direct website sales, which means a growing share of revenue is coming through channels that structurally compress margin even as they drive volume. The part outsiders often get wrong is assuming Slurrp Farm is still primarily a website-and-Instagram D2C brand; by its own founders’ account, it is now a multi-channel general-trade and quick-commerce business first, with the website as one lane among several.
The numbers
Figures below are as reported in Wholsum Foods’ financial filings, compiled and reported by Thekredible (FY22–FY24) and Entrackr (FY25). Amounts are in ₹ crore.
| Fiscal year | Revenue (₹ crore) | Net loss (₹ crore) |
|---|---|---|
| FY22 (year to March 2022) | 19.15 | ~19 (derived from Thekredible’s reported 1.7x rise to FY23) |
| FY23 (year to March 2023) | 41.7 | 32.2 |
| FY24 (year to March 2024) | 73.2 | 25.2 |
| FY25 (year to March 2025) | 95.6 (operating revenue) | 32.7 |
- FY23 revenue more than doubled year-on-year, but losses rose 1.7 times to ₹32.2 crore, per Thekredible’s FY23 review.
- FY24 was the best year on the margin line: revenue jumped 75.5% while the net loss narrowed to ₹25.2 crore from ₹32.2 crore, and EBITDA margin improved from -72.5% to -29.1%, per Thekredible.
- FY25 reversed that improvement: revenue grew about 30% but the loss widened again, by 29%, to ₹32.7 crore, per Entrackr’s February 2026 report citing RoC filings.
- No fiscal year in the four reported here shows a profit; the company has been loss-making in every year for which filings are public.
Where the money comes from
Wholsum Foods does not publicly disaggregate revenue between Slurrp Farm and Millé, since both operate under the same legal entity, so a clean brand-wise split cannot be sourced. What is documented is the channel mix:
- Own website and direct D2C, alongside marketplaces such as Amazon, BigBasket and FirstCry.
- Quick commerce — Swiggy Instamart, Blinkit and Zepto — which Shauravi Malik said in September 2024 generates revenue comparable to marketplace sales, and which she described as increasingly acting as a “proxy for kirana stores” in urban India (afaqs).
- Offline general and modern trade: about 5,000 stores across 80 Indian cities as of September 2024 (afaqs).
- International: organic, largely inbound-led sales into Nepal, Singapore, the UAE, the UK and the US, without a dedicated export sales structure, per Inc42’s April 2022 reporting on the company’s footprint.
The surprise, given the brand’s D2C-era origin story, is how small a share of the current business the original channel — its own website — now appears to represent next to quick commerce, marketplaces and general trade combined.
The risks
- Persistent, and in FY25 widening, losses. The net loss grew from ₹19.15 crore of revenue against roughly ₹19 crore of losses in FY22 to ₹32.7 crore of losses on ₹95.6 crore of revenue in FY25 — an improvement in loss-to-revenue ratio, but the absolute loss in FY25 was higher than in any prior reported year, per Entrackr. The company’s own decision to raise a ₹30 crore extension nearly two years after its last institutional round points to continued dependence on external capital to fund the gap.
- Channel margin pressure. By the founders’ own account to afaqs, quick commerce and marketplaces — both of which typically carry higher platform commissions and heavier promotional discounting than direct sales — now make up a large and growing share of revenue, a structural drag on gross margin as that mix shifts further.
- A track record of missed public targets. The company has stated at least two forward revenue targets that its own later filings did not meet: a ₹150 crore FY22 run-rate goal against audited FY22 revenue of ₹19.15 crore, and a ₹500 crore-by-2025 target against FY25 revenue of ₹95.6 crore. Run-rate guidance and audited annual revenue are different measures, but the repeated gap raises questions about the reliability of forward guidance from the company.
- Untested diversification. Millé, launched in 2023 to extend the business beyond children’s nutrition into adult plant protein, competes in a more crowded aisle against established protein and health-food brands, and Wholsum Foods has not disclosed standalone financials for the brand, making its contribution to the group’s continuing losses or eventual profitability unverifiable from public filings.
The takeaway
The lesson in Wholsum Foods’ filings is not that the company is failing — revenue has grown roughly five-fold from FY22 to FY25, and investors have kept writing checks at rising valuations even as losses persist. It is that a compelling founding story and a real pivot under pressure, like the one forced by the 2020 lockdown, can carry a company a long way without ever squaring the public number with the filed one. Every fundraise since 2022 has come with a fresh forward target, and every filing since has landed well short of the previous one. For a founder telling their own growth story to the press, the discipline that matters most is not picking an ambitious number — it is being willing to say, out loud, when the last one was missed and why.
Frequently asked questions
What does Slurrp Farm sell?
Slurrp Farm sells millet-based packaged food for children — porridges, breakfast cereals, puffed snacks, pancake and dosa mixes, and cake mixes — formulated without maida or added refined sugar, sold through its website, marketplaces, quick commerce and about 5,000 offline stores across 80 Indian cities as of September 2024, per Inc42 and afaqs.
Who founded Slurrp Farm and when?
Meghana Narayan and Shauravi Malik started the company, now called Wholsum Foods Private Limited, in October 2016 in Gurugram; Umang Bhattacharyya later joined as a third co-founder and brand director, per Inc42’s company profile.
Who are Slurrp Farm’s main investors?
Fireside Ventures is the largest institutional shareholder, holding about 20.7% after the January 2024 round (Thekredible). Other backers include the Investment Corporation of Dubai, Alkemi Venture Partners, Raed Capital, Scarlet Ventures (3.7% stake as of February 2026, Entrackr) and actor Anushka Sharma, who is also the brand’s ambassador.
Is Slurrp Farm profitable?
No. Every fiscal year with public filings from FY22 through FY25 shows a net loss; the FY25 loss was ₹32.7 crore on ₹95.6 crore of operating revenue, per Entrackr’s February 2026 report citing RoC filings.
What is Slurrp Farm’s current valuation?
About $90 million (₹810 crore) on a post-money basis, following a ₹30 crore Series C1 extension from Scarlet Ventures in February 2026 — a 59% rise from the roughly $63.95 million (₹510 crore) valuation set in the January 2024 Series C round, per Entrackr and Indian Retailer.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Inc42, “Slurrp Farm Funding” company profile, 2026
- Inc42, “Slurrp Farm Financials” company profile, 2026
- Inc42, “Bollywood Actress Anushka Sharma Invests In D2C Snack Brand Slurrp Farm”, April 2022
- Entrackr, “Exclusive: Anushka Sharma-backed Slurrp Farm raises fresh funds at $90 Mn valuation”, February 2026
- Entrackr, “Exclusive: Anushka Sharma-backed Slurrp Farm raises $7.2 Mn in new round”, January 2024
- Indian Retailer, “Funding Alert: Slurrp Farm Raises Rs 30 Cr in Extended Series C Round from Scarlet Ventures”, February 2026
- Thekredible, “Slurrp Farm: Revenue Jumps 75% to Rs 73.2 Cr in FY24”, 2024
- Thekredible, “Slurrp Farm sees a revenue growth of 2.1X in FY23, losses rise 1.7X”, 2023
- Agritimes, “Wholsum Foods secures USD 7m; targets INR 500 crore revenue by 2025”, February 2022
- Afaqs, “Q-commerce is becoming proxy for Kirana stores: Shauravi Malik of Slurrp Farm”, 9 September 2024
- Forbes India, “Anushka Sharma-backed Wholsum Foods launches high-protein instant food brand, Millé”, 2023
- Al Jazeera, “This Indian startup has not only survived COVID, it is thriving”, 29 December 2020
- Women Can Startup, “Meghana Narayan & Shauravi Malik Slurrp Farm Founder Story”, 2026
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