TenderCuts once raised more than ₹150 crore from investors, ran close to 100 stores across three cities and was, on paper, the south Indian answer to Licious. Then it shrank to 13 stores, sacked most of its staff and was sold off in a distress deal — before quietly becoming, by its own account, India’s first omnichannel meat and seafood brand to report a profitable month.
That whiplash is the whole story. A Chennai butcher-shop-turned-app grew fast enough to burn through its funding, got rescued by a Delhi-NCR rival, and then had to relearn, store by store, what it costs to sell a kilogram of chicken without losing money on it.
Quick facts
| Company | TenderCuts (Tendercuts Ecommerce Ventures) |
| Founded | January 2016, Chennai |
| Founder(s) | Nishanth Chandran (founder-CEO); Sasikumar Kallanai, Varun Prasad Chandran and Venkkatesan R later elevated to co-founder |
| Businesses | Omnichannel fresh meat and seafood retail — neighbourhood stores plus an app, with in-house processing and cold chain |
| Latest revenue | FY26 gross revenue ₹65.65 crore (net ₹62.82 crore), an annualised run-rate of about ₹70 crore (RetailIntel; YourStory, 2025) |
| Latest profit/loss | Company-stated overall EBITDA of about 1% on August 2025 monthly revenue of ₹5.6 crore, its first profitable month; compares with an FY22 loss of ₹126.8 crore (Inc42, citing regulatory filings) |
| Listed | Private — no stock exchange listing |
| Market value / last valuation | Reported at about ₹150 crore around its 2023 distress sale (DT Next); Tracxn’s database separately lists a later figure of ₹443 crore |
| Key shareholders / CEO | Owned by Gurugram-based Good To Go since September 2023; founder Nishanth Chandran exited after the deal |
What they do
TenderCuts sells fresh chicken, mutton, fish and seafood, cut and packed to order, to households in Chennai who want a wet-market butcher’s freshness without a wet market’s mess. It runs neighbourhood stores that double as micro-processing units and an app for home delivery, built around a central cold chain that moves meat from farm to shop within hours. It competes for the same customer as Licious, FreshToHome and Zappfresh, but built its edge on physical stores rather than delivery-only ordering. The prize it is chasing is large: India’s overall meat and seafood market was estimated at ₹4.6 lakh crore for 2024 (about $48 billion), of which organised, branded retail still accounts for a small fraction — online meat specifically was put at roughly 1% of the total as of the early 2020s (Inc42).
The origin
Nishanth Chandran was not a meat-industry veteran. He had co-founded the payments business EBS (e-Billing Solutions) and sold his stake to French PoS major Ingenico in early 2015. Free of that company, he travelled through Europe. What struck him, by his own later account, was the gap between the clinical, traceable way meat was sold there and the unhygienic, unbranded butchering he had grown up with in Indian wet markets. He came back and started TenderCuts in Chennai in January 2016, betting that Indian households would pay a premium for meat they could trust, cut the way they wanted it, and have delivered instead of queued for. Sasikumar Kallanai, Varun Prasad Chandran and Venkkatesan R joined the founding team early and were later formally elevated to co-founder titles as the company grew (BW Disrupt).
The struggle years
The early growth numbers looked like any investor’s dream: revenue of about ₹35 crore in FY20 climbed to roughly ₹100 crore in FY21, helped by a pandemic that pushed shoppers away from crowded meat markets and towards apps (Inc42). TenderCuts read that as validation and expanded hard, pushing past 75 stores — by some counts as many as 100 — across Chennai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru by April 2022, with a headcount that touched roughly 1,600 people. But the pandemic tailwind reversed as soon as customers went back to shopping in person, and the underlying unit economics had never been proven at that scale. FY22 revenue rose to ₹130.9 crore, but losses nearly quadrupled to ₹126.8 crore against total expenses of about ₹259 crore (Inc42, citing regulatory filings). The 2022–23 startup funding winter arrived at the worst possible moment: a Series B round the company needed to fund its store network never closed. Through 2023 it wound down operations in Hyderabad and Bengaluru, shut stores in pockets of Chennai for want of cash, and laid off more than 65% of its workforce, leaving barely a few hundred employees and, depending on which contemporaneous report is believed, somewhere between 16 and 50 stores (BW Disrupt; Inc42).
The turning point
The turning point was not a product launch — it was an acquisition. In September 2023, Gurugram-based omnichannel meat brand Good To Go agreed to buy TenderCuts along with Happy Chops, a marketplace-style platform for local butcher shops that TenderCuts had launched just seven months earlier as a lower-capital pivot. Neither company disclosed deal terms, and reporting at the time noted the announcement was silent on whether TenderCuts’ institutional investors recovered anything on their money (Inc42). A senior TenderCuts executive was blunt about why it happened: the acquisition, they said, “was the only way out” once a Series B round failed to materialise. Founder Nishanth Chandran was expected to exit, and did; he has since started an AI-based retail-theft-detection venture, Visu.ai. What changed operationally is the more interesting number: TenderCuts went from roughly 75 stores at its 2022 peak to just 13 stores by October 2023, all in Chennai, run leaner and smaller. Two years later, in August 2025, the company said those 13-to-18 stores had, for the first time, turned the business EBITDA-positive as a whole.
The money behind it
- Total raised: reported figures diverge by database — Inc42’s tracker puts cumulative funding at roughly $21.3 million, while Tracxn’s lists a higher $38.1 million across nine rounds (Inc42; Tracxn).
- Paragon Partners — led the headline ₹110 crore (about $15 million) equity round in February 2021 alongside agritech-focused NABVENTURES; this was the capital that funded the multi-city store expansion (Business Standard, February 2021).
- NABVENTURES — the NABARD-backed agri-focused fund that co-invested in the same February 2021 round, reflecting TenderCuts’ pitch as a farm-to-fork supply chain business, not just a delivery app (Business Standard, February 2021; Indian Retailer).
- Stride Ventures — provided about $3.5 million of venture debt in 2021 to supplement the equity raise, a structure typical of capital-intensive omnichannel retail (Inc42).
- Latest valuation: a reported ₹150 crore around the September 2023 distress sale (DT Next) — a steep step down implied for equity holders versus the scale the company had reached the previous year — against a later ₹443 crore figure in Tracxn’s database after the Good To Go-led turnaround.
- Post-acquisition financing: a further $2 million in debt financing was reported in 2026 to fund the current Chennai store rollout (RetailIntel).
How it makes money
TenderCuts earns the way any fresh-food retailer does: it buys live animals and fish, processes them in-house, and sells the cut, cleaned product at a margin over cost, through both its stores and its app.
- Gross margin: reported at around 40% on product, with a further roughly 5 percentage points added by backward integration into farming and processing (Industrial Economist).
- Wastage control: dump losses (unsold, spoiled stock) kept below 5% and processing wastage under 2%, the two levers that make or break a perishable-goods retailer’s margin (Industrial Economist).
- Channel mix: revenue currently splits roughly 60% online and 40% offline in-store, with about 10% coming from adjacent categories beyond raw meat and seafood, such as ready-to-cook and marinated products (RetailIntel).
- Store economics: newer, leaner stores were breaking even on an EBITDA basis in 6–7 months versus 15–18 months for the pre-2023 format, the single biggest fix behind the 2025 profitability claim (YourStory).
- Customer economics: blended customer acquisition cost below ₹100, against roughly 40,000 monthly active transacting users and an 85% repeat-customer rate (RetailIntel).
- The part people get wrong: the headline “meat delivery app” framing undersells how much of the margin sits in offline retail and processing discipline, not in app growth — the company’s own turnaround was store-led, not app-led.
The numbers
Figures below are as reported for each period; unit is ₹ crore. Pre-2023 figures reflect the multi-city expansion phase; the FY26 line reflects the post-restructuring, Chennai-only business.
| Period | Revenue (₹ crore) | Profit / (Loss) |
| FY20 | ~35 | Not disclosed |
| FY21 | ~100 | Not disclosed |
| FY22 | 130.9 | (126.8) |
| FY26 (gross) | 65.65 (net 62.82) | Overall EBITDA ~1% positive; store-level EBITDA ~10% (company-stated, August 2025) |
- FY20 revenue: about ₹35 crore (Inc42).
- FY21 revenue: about ₹100 crore, boosted by pandemic-era demand for home delivery (Inc42).
- FY22 revenue: ₹130.9 crore against a loss of ₹126.8 crore and total expenses of about ₹259 crore — losses nearly quadrupled year-on-year (Inc42, citing regulatory filings).
- FY26 gross revenue: ₹65.65 crore (net ₹62.82 crore), down sharply from the FY22 peak but attached, for the first time, to a positive overall EBITDA (RetailIntel).
- Forward targets, not actuals: an ARR of ₹120 crore by March 2026 and an annualised run-rate near ₹220 crore by FY27, alongside plans to grow from 18 to 50 outlets by March 2027 (FranchiseBazar; RetailIntel).
Where the money comes from
- Geography: 100% Chennai today, down from a three-city footprint (Chennai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru) at the 2022 peak — Hyderabad and Bengaluru operations were wound down during the 2022–23 crisis (Inc42; DT Next).
- Channel: about 60% of revenue online through the app, 40% offline through walk-in stores (RetailIntel).
- Category: core fresh chicken, mutton, fish and seafood plus roughly 10% of revenue from adjacent, higher-margin categories such as ready-to-cook and marinated products (RetailIntel).
- Store footprint: 18 stores as of 2025, each built to serve a roughly 4-km catchment, against a target of 50 outlets by March 2027 (FranchiseBazar).
- The surprise: a company built and funded as a multi-city, app-led growth story now describes its comeback in almost the opposite terms — smaller, single-city, offline-weighted stores with tighter processing, not wider delivery reach.
The risks
- Capital intensity meeting a closed funding window: the omnichannel model needs continuous capital for stores, processing centres and cold chain; when the 2022–23 funding winter closed off a planned Series B, TenderCuts had no room left to absorb losses and was sold in distress within months (Inc42; DT Next). Any future scale-up carries the same exposure to funding-market timing.
- Thin margin on a perishable product: even after the turnaround, overall EBITDA is reported at roughly 1%, against store-level EBITDA of about 10% — the gap is corporate overhead and central processing cost that has to be absorbed as the network grows again (YourStory; FranchiseBazar). Fresh meat and seafood cannot be held as inventory, so any demand miscalculation converts directly into wastage.
- Crowded, well-funded competition on a small opening: online meat is still roughly 1% of India’s overall meat market, and TenderCuts competes for that sliver against Licious, FreshToHome, Zappfresh and quick-commerce apps, while organised retail overall holds only about 20% of the category against 80% for unorganised, informal sellers (Inc42; FranchiseBazar) — leaving little protection if any single rival outspends it on customer acquisition again.
The takeaway
TenderCuts’ lesson is not that omnichannel meat retail cannot work in India — its own numbers argue the model can turn a profit at the store level, at 10% EBITDA, when run lean. The lesson is that growth funded faster than unit economics can be proven is a debt that eventually comes due, in this case as a distress sale and a 65% headcount cut. The company that survived is a smaller, plainer version of the one that raised the headline funding round: fewer stores, one city, thinner margins, but for the first time, on the right side of them.
Frequently asked questions
Who founded TenderCuts and when?
Nishanth Chandran founded TenderCuts in Chennai in January 2016 after exiting the payments company EBS. Sasikumar Kallanai, Varun Prasad Chandran and Venkkatesan R were part of the founding team and were later formally elevated to co-founder status.
Why was TenderCuts sold in 2023?
After scaling to around 75–100 stores across three cities by 2022, TenderCuts posted an FY22 loss of ₹126.8 crore and could not close a planned Series B round during the 2022–23 funding winter. It shut operations in Hyderabad and Bengaluru, cut over 65% of its workforce, and was acquired by Gurugram-based Good To Go in September 2023 in what reports described as a distress sale (Inc42; DT Next).
Is TenderCuts profitable now?
The company said in 2025 that it had become India’s first omnichannel meat and seafood brand to post a profitable month, reporting an overall EBITDA of about 1% and a store-level EBITDA of about 10% on August 2025 revenue of ₹5.6 crore (YourStory; FranchiseBazar).
How much funding has TenderCuts raised in total?
Reported totals vary by database: Inc42 puts cumulative funding at roughly $21.3 million, including a ₹110 crore ($15 million) round led by Paragon Partners and NABVENTURES in February 2021 plus $3.5 million in venture debt from Stride Ventures, while Tracxn’s database lists a higher total of $38.1 million across nine rounds.
Who owns TenderCuts today?
TenderCuts has been owned by Gurugram-based omnichannel meat brand Good To Go since the September 2023 acquisition. Founder Nishanth Chandran exited after the deal and has since started an AI-based retail-analytics venture, Visu.ai.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Business Standard, “Meat brand TenderCuts raises $15 mn from Paragon Partners, Nabard VC,” February 2021
- Inc42, “Good To Go Acquires Paragon Backed TenderCuts In A Distress Sale,” September 2023
- Inc42, “TenderCuts Bets Big On Quality, Omnichannel Strategy To Tap Into INR 4.6 Lakh Cr Meat Market Opportunity,” 2021
- Inc42, “TenderCuts’ Founder Nishanth RaviChandran Launches AI-Powered Analytics Startup,” 2023
- DT Next, “Starved of funds, city-based TenderCuts founder on verge of sealing sale deal,” September 2023
- BW Disrupt, “Gurugram’s Good To Go Acquires South-Based TenderCuts,” September 2023
- BW Disrupt, “TenderCuts Elevates Its Top Brass As Co-Founders”
- Industrial Economist, “The Meat Disruptors”
- YourStory, “TenderCuts’ second innings: Lean stores, offline push, and focus on unit economics,” August 2025
- FranchiseBazar, “Tender Cuts Franchise — India’s Strongest Meat Retail Franchise for 2026,” 2026
- RetailIntel, “TenderCuts plans 22 new Chennai stores in 12 months,” 2026
- Tracxn, TenderCuts company profile, funding and valuation data, accessed September 2026
- Trading Economics, USD/INR exchange rate, 18 September 2026
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