Startup Deep Dive : WayCool — a Rs 685 crore loss the year an IPO was promised

In the year it told the Registrar of Companies it had lost Rs 685 crore, WayCool Foods was also telling reporters that a stock market listing was two years away. Both things were true at once. The Chennai-based food and agri supply-chain company had just crossed Rs 1,000 crore in revenue for the first time, and it was burning cash faster than almost any other Indian agritech to get there.

WayCool sits between roughly 85,000 small farmers and the retailers, hotels and kitchens that buy from them, running trucks, warehouses and a growing stack of its own packaged-food brands in between. It has raised well over $250 million since 2015, been called a candidate for India’s first agritech unicorn, and then spent 2023 to 2025 laying off staff, losing a co-founder, changing auditors and appearing before India’s bankruptcy tribunal. This is the story of how a supply-chain idea that farmers and big retailers both liked still could not, on the numbers available as of September 2026, make money.

Quick facts

What they do

WayCool runs a full-stack food and agri supply chain: it buys fresh produce, staples, spices and dairy from a network it describes as around 85,000 small and marginal farmers, most of them working two acres or less, and moves that produce through its own warehouses and trucks to general trade stores, supermarkets, online grocers, and foodservice buyers such as hotel and catering chains. On top of that trading business it has layered a portfolio of its own packaged brands, sold under names including Madhuram, KitchenJi, L’exotique and Freshey’s, and a small owned-retail footprint in Chennai under the SunnyBee banner. The pitch to farmers is a guaranteed buyer and better realisation than the local mandi; the pitch to retailers and hotels is fill rates the company says run at 95 to 98 percent, sourced through one relationship instead of dozens of local traders.

The origin

WayCool was started in July 2015 by Karthik Jayaraman and Sanjay Dasari. Jayaraman, an IIT Madras engineering graduate, had spent close to two decades in the automotive industry at Ashok Leyland, Tata Motors and bearings maker Timken, with a stint at McKinsey & Company as a management consultant, before starting the company past the age of 40. Dasari, a graduate of Babson College’s entrepreneurship programme in the United States with prior experience at Boston Consulting Group, took on partnerships, brand and go-to-market. A third co-founder, Vignesh Kumar Manogaran, rounded out the founding team. The founding insight, as the company and its early coverage described it, was that India’s fresh food economy ran on a chain of local aggregators and traders between farmer and buyer, each taking a small cut and adding a delay, and that a company with trucks, cold storage, demand forecasting software and direct farmer relationships could shorten that chain, cut wastage, and pass part of the savings back to farmers while still building a business on the rest. It was explicitly not a marketplace app; it was an asset-heavy operator willing to hold inventory and own the last mile, competing more with traditional mandi traders than with other startups.

The struggle years

The clearest sign that the model is hard to run profitably is in the losses, but the operational history has been just as bumpy. In July 2023, after months of trying to close a fresh funding round, WayCool laid off around 300 employees, cutting headcount sharply from roughly 2,300 in September 2022. A second, smaller round of cuts affecting about 70 employees followed in February 2024, and a third round, this time cutting more than 200 roles across departments, came in July 2024 — the company’s third restructuring inside twelve months, by its own description aimed at reaching profitability faster. Two former employees told reporters in early 2025 that warehouse staff had manipulated invoice numbers and generated fake orders after missing sales targets tied to unpaid incentives, an allegation the company has not, in the sources reviewed for this piece, publicly and specifically rebutted. By September 2024, auditor KPMG India had resigned from the engagement, citing cost overruns and unpaid fees, with a replacement auditor only formally filed in March 2025. Co-founder Sanjay Dasari, who had spoken publicly in 2023 about the company’s IPO ambitions, stepped down from his operational role in December 2024. By April 2025, three separate insolvency petitions, including one filed by a company director and one by agri-fintech lender Kushal Finnovation Capital, were listed for hearing before the Chennai bench of the National Company Law Tribunal, tied to more than Rs 450 crore in outstanding loans recorded in the company’s Ministry of Corporate Affairs filings.

The turning point

The hinge event was a funding round that never closed. In early 2023, on the back of a $41 million raise led by Lightrock India, WayCool’s valuation was reported at $750 million. Riding that, the company went out later in 2023 looking to raise a further $50 million to $70 million at a valuation of around $900 million. Investors, in the middle of a broader pullback from growth-stage Indian startups, did not bite. The round did not close. Within months, WayCool cut roughly 300 jobs, and the valuation cited in its most recent completed equity round slipped to $700 million — a marker still short of the $900 million it had been chasing, and one that has not been publicly bettered since. Every difficulty that followed, from the layoffs to the auditor’s resignation to the founder’s exit to the tribunal filings, traces back to that gap between the capital the company needed to keep growing at its prior pace and the capital that turned up.

The money behind it

WayCool has been a magnet for impact-oriented and development-finance capital since its early years, reflecting its farmer-facing pitch. Its largest disclosed single round was a $117 million Series D in January 2022, structured as $95 million of equity and $22 million of debt, led by Lightrock with participation from FMO (the Dutch development bank), the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation, Lightbox, Lightsmith, Redwood Equity Partners and Gawa Capital. Lightrock has stayed the most consistent backer: it led the $41 million round in early 2023 that pushed the valuation to $750 million, and it came back again in March 2026 with a Rs 210 crore (about $22.7 million) rights issue priced at Rs 5,347 a share, described by DealStreetAsia as the company’s first major equity infusion in close to four years. In between, WayCool leaned on venture debt to bridge the gap, including roughly Rs 38.2 crore from Trifecta Capital, Alteria Capital and Stride Ventures in January 2025 and about $25 million in debt raised across FY25 overall. Databases disagree on the lifetime total: Inc42’s tracker puts cumulative funding at roughly $304 million, while Tracxn and Crunchbase-style aggregations, which appear to count a longer tail of smaller and debt rounds, put the figure anywhere from $309 million to $388 million. What is not disputed is the shape of it: heavy early equity from impact and development investors, a marquee 2022 round, a 2023 valuation peak that a bigger follow-on round failed to beat, and debt-plus-rights-issue bridging since.

How it makes money

WayCool earns money the way a trading and distribution business earns money: it buys fresh produce, staples and dairy from farmers and aggregators, adds logistics, sorting, grading and financing, and sells that produce on to retailers, modern trade chains, online grocers and foodservice accounts such as hotel and catering groups, at a markup over its procurement cost. Procurement is the single biggest cost line by far — Rs 1,199 crore of the company’s roughly Rs 3,857 crore in FY23 total expenses — which is normal for a low-margin trading model but means the business lives or dies on how tightly it manages spoilage, price swings in fresh produce, and the gap between paying farmers and collecting from retailers. Layered on top is a smaller, higher-margin business in owned FMCG brands (Madhuram, KitchenJi, L’exotique, Freshey’s) and a Chennai retail arm, SunnyBee, where WayCool captures the full retail price rather than a distributor’s cut; the company has said close to a third of one recent year’s revenue came from these owned brands rather than pure trading. The part outside observers most often get wrong is treating WayCool like a tech marketplace with a clean take rate: it does not disclose a take rate because it is not one — it is an asset-heavy operator that owns trucks, warehouses and inventory, which is exactly why its costs, and its losses, scale with revenue rather than shrinking as a share of it.

The numbers

Only FY22 and FY23 have audited numbers in the public domain as of this piece; FY24 and FY25 filings had not surfaced in company registry disclosures reviewed for this piece, though the company has given the press an unaudited FY24 revenue figure.

The FY23 jump is stark either way it is read: revenue rose 62 percent year on year, crossing Rs 1,000 crore for the first time, but the net loss rose faster, up close to 89 percent, and total expenses nearly doubled. Employee costs alone rose 65 percent to Rs 243 crore. None of the public filings reviewed break out a separate EBITDA line for FY23, so the loss figures above are net losses, not operating losses; the company has separately claimed, without a public audited figure attached, that EBITDA losses fell sharply through cost cuts made in 2024.

Where the money comes from

The clearest disclosed split is by product line rather than geography: WayCool’s own reporting attributes essentially all of its revenue, 98 percent in FY23, to product sales, with the remaining 2 percent from services. Within product sales, the company has pointed to two broad buckets — trading of fresh produce, staples and dairy sourced from its farmer network, and its own packaged FMCG brands, which the company has said made up close to a third of a recent year’s revenue. Geographically the business is heavily India-weighted, distributing to what the company describes as more than 850 towns, with a foodservice client list that includes hotel and catering groups such as the Taj group of hotels, Elior and Sodexo; it has also described an international foothold, including operations connected to the UAE. The surprise, given how the company is usually described as a farmer-to-retailer supply chain business, is how much of the future growth story it is now pinning on the branded, higher-margin FMCG side rather than on the lower-margin trading volumes that built it.

The risks

Three risks stand out, and the company’s own disclosures point to at least two of them. First, the model is fundamentally low-margin and working-capital intensive: fresh produce spoils, prices swing daily, and the company must pay farmers close to real time while waiting on retailer and foodservice payment cycles, which is precisely the mechanism that produced the FY23 loss even as revenue grew strongly. Second, financial controls and governance have visibly strained: the fake-invoicing allegations reported by former warehouse employees, the resignation of auditor KPMG over unpaid fees, and the subsequent gap in filed financial statements all point to a company that outgrew its back-office controls during its fastest growth years. Third, WayCool remains dependent on a narrow set of return investors for survival capital rather than a broad, competitive market for growth capital — the March 2026 round came from the same investor, Lightrock, that had led its 2022 and early-2023 rounds, and it followed a period in which venture debt providers, not new equity investors, kept the company funded, which leaves it exposed if that one relationship cools.

The takeaway

WayCool’s history is a reminder that solving a real, sympathetic problem — helping small farmers get a fairer price while cutting waste in the chain to the retailer — does not by itself produce a business that makes money. The company built genuine scale, tens of thousands of farmer relationships, distribution into hundreds of towns, and brand recognition among large hotel and retail chains, and none of that scale converted into profit on the numbers filed through FY23. The lesson that transfers well beyond agritech is about sequencing: raising toward a valuation the business has not yet earned, on the assumption that the next larger round will always be there to fund the gap, works only until a funding winter proves it wrong, and by then the layoffs, the departed co-founder and the strained back office are already baked in.

Frequently asked questions

What does WayCool Foods do?

WayCool runs a food and agri supply chain that sources fresh produce, staples and dairy from a network of small farmers and distributes it to retailers, modern trade chains and foodservice buyers, alongside its own packaged FMCG brands and a small Chennai retail chain.

Who founded WayCool and when?

WayCool was founded in July 2015 in Chennai by Karthik Jayaraman and Sanjay Dasari, along with Vignesh Kumar Manogaran.

How much money has WayCool raised, and what is it worth?

Estimates of lifetime funding range from roughly $304 million (Inc42) to as much as $388 million (Tracxn), depending on whether debt and smaller rounds are counted. Its valuation was reported at $750 million in early 2023 and cited at $700 million after a larger raise failed to close later that year; no higher valuation has been publicly confirmed since.

Is WayCool profitable?

Not as of its last audited filing. WayCool reported a net loss of Rs 685 crore in FY23 on revenue of Rs 1,251 crore. The company has said it targeted operational break-even in FY24, but FY24 and FY25 audited results were not available in company registry filings reviewed for this piece.

Is WayCool planning an IPO?

Co-founder Sanjay Dasari said in 2023 that WayCool was targeting a public listing by 2025, conditional on consecutive profitable quarters. As of September 2026, no listing has followed, Dasari has since stepped down from his operational role, and the company remains privately held.

Sources

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

• Inc42, “WayCool Foods FY23: Loss Up 89% To INR 685 Cr, Revenue Crosses INR 1K Cr Mark”, August 2024
• Entrackr, “Waycool posts Rs 1,251 Cr revenue and Rs 686 Cr loss in FY23”, July 2024
• The Captable, “Layoffs, fake invoices and mounting debt: Can WayCool bounce back?”, February 2025
• The Captable, “WayCool Foods faces NCLT heat amidst mounting debt and auditor resignation”, April 2025
• Entrackr, “WayCool closes $117 Mn Series D round”, January 2022
• Business Standard, “WayCool Foods raises $117 mn in Series D from Lightrock, IFC and others”, January 2022
• Inc42, “Exclusive: Agritech Startup Waycool Raises Rs 210 Cr From Lightrock India”, March 2026
• DealStreetAsia, “Lightrock leads $22.7m funding in WayCool and other India deals”, March 2026
• Business Standard, “WayCool lays off over 200 employees, aims to achieve profitability”, July 2024
• Startup Story, “WayCool Foods Axes 70 Employees in Second Restructuring Blitz Within a Year”, 2024
• Inc42, “Agritech Startup WayCool Slated For An IPO In 2025: Sanjay Dasari”, 2023
• YourStory, “Why farm-to-fork supply chain startup WayCool Foods…”, August 2019
• Gulf Business, “Interview with Karthik Jayaraman, MD & co-founder of WayCool”
• Tracxn, WayCool company profile, accessed September 2026
• IFC disclosure database, Project 45523 – WayCool, accessed September 2026

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