Wow! Momo runs more than 850 outlets, carries a private valuation of roughly ₹2,800 crore, and has just told its cofounder’s own CEO commentary that it is “highly profitable” at the operating level. And yet in every audited year on record — FY22, FY23 and FY24 — the company has closed its books with a net loss, most recently ₹114 crore on ₹470 crore of revenue.
That gap between the story a fast-growing consumer brand tells about itself and what its balance sheet actually says is the real subject of this piece. Wow! Momo is, by most measures, India’s most recognisable branded momo chain — but it is also a company that pivoted through a pandemic that nearly emptied its dining rooms, restructured itself into three more restaurant brands and a packaged-food business to survive, and in January 2026 was forced to answer for a warehouse fire that killed people working under its name. None of that shows up in a franchise brochure.
Quick facts
| Company | Wow! Momo Foods Private Limited |
| Founded | 29 August 2008, Kolkata |
| Founder(s) | Sagar Daryani and Binod Homagai (St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata alumni) |
| Businesses | Wow! Momo, Wow! Chicken, Wow! China and Wow! Kulfi (QSR); a packaged frozen-food FMCG line; a HORECA supply arm |
| Latest disclosed FY revenue | ₹470 crore (FY24, audited); ~₹640 crore reported for FY25 (unaudited, company-stated) |
| Latest disclosed FY profit/loss | Net loss of ₹114 crore (FY24, audited); EBITDA positive at ₹38.2 crore for the first time |
| Listed | Private; not listed. Management has spoken of an IPO, timeline unconfirmed |
| Market value / last valuation | Reported at roughly ₹2,740–2,838 crore (about $285–296 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) as of its most recent primary rounds |
| Key shareholders / CEO | Sagar Daryani (cofounder-CEO); institutional backers including Tiger Global, Khazanah Nasional Berhad, Tree Line Investment Management and OAKS; founders held about 34.8% as of September 2025 |
What they do
Wow! Momo sells momos, and increasingly a lot more than momos, through a network of company-run and franchised quick-service outlets, plus a growing packaged-food line sold through supermarkets and e-commerce. The core proposition it started with in 2008 was simple: take a snack that in most Indian cities was sold off a handcart with no name, no hygiene assurance and no consistency, and put it behind a branded counter with a fixed menu and fixed price. Over 17 years that single idea has forked into four restaurant brands under one holding company — Wow! Momo itself, the fried-chicken format Wow! Chicken, the Indo-Chinese format Wow! China, and the dessert format Wow! Kulfi — sitting inside food courts, high streets, kiosks and cloud kitchens across more than 95 Indian cities. Since 2021 the company has also sold frozen, ready-to-cook momos and other snacks directly to households through modern retail and online grocery, competing less with other restaurants and more with the freezer aisle.
The origin
The founding insight came from a gap the two founders could see every day on the streets of Kolkata: momos were everywhere, and no one owned the category. Sagar Daryani and Binod Homagai, friends from St. Xavier’s College, borrowed ₹30,000 from Daryani’s father and took a small kiosk on a monthly rent-cum-revenue-share of 18% of sales inside Spencer’s Retail in south Kolkata. The kiosk opened on 29 August 2008. It made about ₹2,200 in sales on its first day and around ₹53,000 by the end of its first month, according to accounts the founders have given in interviews. Neither founder came from a food or hospitality background in the conventional sense — the pitch, repeated by both men since, was that a street food eaten across India had no branded, quality-controlled version anywhere, and that whoever built one first would own an entire category rather than compete for share of an existing one. That bet on category-creation rather than competing head-on with existing QSR chains is the thread that runs through everything the company has done since, including its later, much larger bet on fried chicken and Indo-Chinese formats sold under separate brand names rather than as menu extensions of the momo brand.
The struggle years
The clearest near-death moment in Wow! Momo’s history was not a funding crunch or a boardroom fight — it was March 2020. Dine-in restaurant chains across India were shut almost overnight when the national COVID-19 lockdown began, and Wow! Momo was no exception: of the company’s roughly 345 outlets at the time, only around 190–200 stayed operational through the lockdown period, and even those had to abandon dine-in entirely. The company’s own account of that period says delivery went from about 27% of revenue to close to 90% within weeks, an inversion of the business almost overnight. Rather than wait out the shutdown, the company used its existing kitchen and delivery network to launch an essentials-delivery arm, Wow! Momo Essential Services, tying up with Swiggy’s grocery vertical and partnering with FMCG majors including ITC, Nestle, Emami and P&G to deliver groceries and household staples through the same riders and kitchens that used to move momos. It also struck a space- and cost-sharing arrangement with Café Coffee Day, putting momo counters inside CCD outlets to spread fixed costs across two struggling businesses at once. Out of that same disruption came the company’s second setback-turned-pivot: in 2021, after more than a decade as a pure restaurant business, Wow! Momo entered the FMCG aisle for the first time, launching frozen, ready-to-cook momos initially sold exclusively on BigBasket in ten cities before expanding to roughly 1,000 modern-trade touchpoints. What began as a pandemic survival tactic — selling food people could cook at home when they could not eat out — became a deliberate second growth engine that the company still leans on today.
A second, far more serious setback landed in January 2026. In the early hours of 26 January, a fire that the company says began at a neighbouring warehouse in Kolkata’s Anandapur area, reportedly linked to unauthorised cooking activity on that adjoining property, spread into one of Wow! Momo’s own warehouse premises and destroyed it. The company stated that two of its employees and one contracted security guard died in the blaze at its own facility. The fire was part of a larger warehouse-complex tragedy in the Nazirabad-Anandapur belt that, across multiple units, killed at least 21 people according to contemporaneous reporting, with some early reports citing a higher toll as search operations continued. Police arrested the owner of the neighbouring warehouse where the fire is alleged to have started on charges related to death by negligence, and the incident drew public comment from the Prime Minister’s office, which announced compensation for victims’ families, alongside sharp questions in the West Bengal press about warehouse safety standards and oversight across Kolkata’s industrial clusters, Wow! Momo’s included.
The turning point
The single event that best captures where Wow! Momo now stands is not a funding round or a store-count milestone — it is the FY24 result itself, because it contains a contradiction inside one balance sheet. On one side, the company crossed into EBITDA profitability for the first time in its history, posting positive EBITDA of about ₹38.2 crore in FY24 against an EBITDA loss of roughly ₹1.7–7.4 crore the year before (reports vary on the exact prior-year figure but agree on the direction). That is the number the company and its investors point to as proof the underlying restaurant economics finally work at scale. On the other side of the same ledger, revenue growth collapsed from 88% in FY23 to just 14% in FY24, and the net loss barely moved, printing at about ₹114 crore versus a comparable prior-year loss cited in the same filing analysis at roughly ₹114 crore as well (an earlier, separately reported FY23 filing had put that year’s loss at a much lower ₹60.5 crore — a discrepancy discussed in the numbers section below). In other words, FY24 is the year Wow! Momo proved its stores can generate cash before overheads, and simultaneously the year its growth engine visibly stalled and losses stayed stubborn. Every claim the company has made since about an FY27 IPO runs through that single, unresolved tension.
The money behind it
Wow! Momo has raised money in stages that map neatly onto its own growth stages. Tiger Global Management led a $23 million Series B round in 2019 that valued the company at about $120 million (roughly ₹850 crore at the exchange rate then prevailing) — the round that first put a serious global growth investor’s name behind a momo chain and signalled to the Indian QSR market that branded regional street food could be venture-scale. Tree Line Investment Management led a $15 million Series C in September 2021, with IAN Fund and existing backer Lighthouse Funds also participating, valuing the company at roughly ₹1,225 crore ($165 million) — money raised straight out of the pandemic to fund the FMCG pivot and rebuild the dine-in network. The most consequential round came in January 2024, when Khazanah Nasional Berhad, Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund, led a Series D that opened with a $42 million (about ₹350 crore) cheque and grew across several tranches — including a further $9 million and later an additional ₹75 crore from Singularity AMC in December 2025 — to a combined Series D of roughly ₹480 crore ($51 million), pushing the company’s post-money valuation to about ₹2,838 crore. Other reported figures put the company’s 2025 valuation closer to ₹2,740 crore (about $330 million as stated by that tracker); the two numbers sit close enough together, and far enough from a single confirmed primary round, that this piece treats ₹2,740–2,838 crore as the reported valuation range rather than a single figure. Beyond the equity, Wow! Momo has increasingly used structured debt to fund store expansion without further diluting existing shareholders: Anicut Capital agreed to provide ₹110 crore via non-convertible debentures in 2026, and the company separately lined up a larger ₹185 crore debt facility led by InCred. Across all instruments, one tracker puts Wow! Momo’s total capital raised at $179 million over 16 rounds. What each backer changed is fairly distinct: Tiger Global’s cheque bought the company credibility with later-stage global investors; Tree Line’s Series C financed the pandemic-era FMCG pivot; and Khazanah’s Series D, the largest single primary infusion, financed the aggressive FY25–FY26 store rollout that took the chain from roughly 600 to more than 850 outlets.
How it makes money
Money comes in from three places: company-owned restaurant sales, franchise fees and royalties from franchised outlets, and, since 2021, direct sales of packaged frozen food to retailers and consumers. On the restaurant side, Wow! Momo mixes company-operated stores with a franchise network; franchise-listing platforms that publish the company’s disclosed terms describe a royalty in the mid-single-digit percentage of a franchisee’s monthly sales, layered on top of a separate franchise fee and a requirement that franchisees buy core ingredients from company-approved central kitchens — a structure common across Indian QSR chains, where the parent earns not just a cut of sales but a markup on the raw material it supplies. Money goes out mostly on raw materials — cost of material procurement was about ₹158 crore in FY24, or 26.6% of total expenditure — followed by rent, employee costs (₹120 crore in FY24) and marketing and franchisee-facing commissions. The company’s own FY24 filing shows total expenditure grew 11.9% to ₹593 crore even as revenue grew only 13.8%, meaning the margin improvement investors point to came from the EBITDA line firming up, not from costs actually falling. The part most outsiders get wrong is assuming Wow! Momo’s economics still run on momos: by FY24, the fried-chicken brand Wow! Chicken had become the single largest contributor to the group’s QSR sales, not the momo brand that gives the company its name — a fact addressed directly in the next section.
The numbers
Figures below are drawn from the company’s own regulatory filings as reported by Entrackr and Inc42, which track Indian startup financials from Registrar of Companies data. All figures are in ₹ crore.
| Financial year | Revenue from operations (₹ crore) | Net profit/(loss) (₹ crore) |
| FY22 | 220 | (53.4) |
| FY23 | 413 | (60.5) as first reported; a later comparative disclosure cited FY23 loss as (113.8) |
| FY24 | 470 | (114.4) |
| FY25 (reported, unaudited at time of writing) | ~640 (about 30%+ growth) | Not independently verified; CEO has described the business as “highly profitable” at a 6–7% corporate EBITDA level |
The FY23 loss figure is worth flagging on its own: an Inc42 report published in May 2024, based on the company’s FY23 filing, put the net loss at ₹60.5 crore, up from ₹53.4 crore in FY22. A later Entrackr analysis of the FY24 filing, published when FY24 numbers came out, cited the FY23 comparative loss figure as ₹113.8 crore — nearly double. Both figures trace back to the same company’s regulatory filings; the gap most likely reflects a restatement or a different treatment of non-cash items such as fair-value changes on compulsorily convertible instruments, which routinely swing reported losses at Indian startups without changing the underlying cash business. This piece reports both figures rather than picking one, because neither claim could be independently reconciled from public filings alone. Revenue growth itself decelerated sharply and verifiably: from 87.7% in FY23 to 13.8% in FY24, even as the company’s own guidance for FY25 pointed to renewed acceleration toward ₹650 crore and beyond.
Where the money comes from
The surprise inside Wow! Momo’s revenue mix is that the brand on the sign is not where most of the money comes from anymore. According to a FY24 sales breakdown reported by Storyboard18, Wow! Chicken accounted for 55% of the QSR chain’s overall sales that year, with the original Wow! Momo brand contributing 35%, Wow! China 8% and the newer Wow! Kulfi format the remaining 2%. That is a near-total inversion of what the company name suggests, and it reflects a deliberate strategy of launching adjacent formats under distinct brand names — betting each on the same real-estate footprint and central-kitchen infrastructure built for momos — rather than diversifying the core Wow! Momo menu. Geographically, the company remains rooted in the east, with Kolkata as its manufacturing and warehousing base (the site of the January 2026 fire), while its store network has fanned out from roughly 35 cities to more than 95 across India in the space of about two years, alongside an early push into the Middle East through a regional distribution partnership covering the UAE and wider MENA market. Separately, the FMCG frozen-food arm — momos, frozen coconut, kulfi and cup noodles sold through modern retail and e-commerce — was targeting about ₹100 crore of revenue on its own in FY25, a small slice of the group’s total but the fastest-growing and highest-margin piece of the business, since it carries none of the real-estate and staffing costs of a restaurant network.
The risks
The most immediate risk is the one the company is living through as this piece is written: safety and governance scrutiny following the January 2026 Anandapur warehouse fire. Beyond the human cost, the incident has triggered police action, government compensation announcements and public questions about whether warehouse and vendor-premises safety standards across the company’s Kolkata cluster were adequate — the kind of scrutiny that can slow store approvals, complicate franchise renewals or raise insurance and compliance costs regardless of how the specific legal liability is eventually apportioned. The second risk is financial: Wow! Momo has not reported a profitable year on a net basis in any audited filing available publicly, and its expansion to 850-plus stores has been funded through a steady drumbeat of both equity and debt rounds — including two separate debt raises (₹110 crore from Anicut Capital, ₹185 crore led by InCred) inside a matter of months in 2025–26. A business that depends on continuously refinancing its growth is exposed if funding markets tighten, interest costs rise, or a planned IPO slips further than the roughly two-year timeline management floated in 2024. The third risk is structural to the category: momos, fried chicken and Indo-Chinese food are all low-differentiation, low-barrier-to-entry formats, contested by both large organised chains and the same unbranded street vendors Wow! Momo originally set out to outcompete; input costs for chicken, cooking oil and packaging move independently of the company’s pricing power, and FY24’s own filings show total expenditure growing faster than revenue in the very year the company was trying to demonstrate operating leverage.
The takeaway
The lesson in Wow! Momo’s story is not “brand an unbranded street food and win” — plenty of copycats have tried that and failed. It is that owning a category is not the same as owning its economics, and the two can diverge for a very long time. Wow! Momo spent seventeen years building genuine category leadership in branded momos, then diversified into three more formats and a packaged-goods business largely because the original category, however dominant, was not generating enough margin on its own to justify the fixed costs of a national restaurant footprint. The company’s own numbers show that even a business with real scale, real brand recognition and blue-chip institutional backing can post a loss every single audited year while still being, by its founders’ account, a fundamentally sound and improving business — because restaurant economics reward density, format diversity and a second, asset-light revenue stream (in this case, packaged food) far more than they reward being first to a category. For any founder building a consumer brand around a single product, the transferable point is to ask early what the second and third product lines will be, long before the first one’s economics force the question.
Frequently asked questions
Who founded Wow! Momo and when?
Sagar Daryani and Binod Homagai, friends from St. Xavier’s College in Kolkata, founded the business on 29 August 2008, starting with a single kiosk inside a Spencer’s Retail store funded by a ₹30,000 loan from Daryani’s father.
How much is Wow! Momo valued at?
Reported figures place the company’s most recent valuation between roughly ₹2,740 crore and ₹2,838 crore (about $285–296 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0), based on its Series D round led by Khazanah Nasional Berhad and subsequent add-on tranches through 2025.
Is Wow! Momo profitable?
Not on a net basis in any audited year publicly reported through FY24, when it posted a loss of about ₹114 crore on ₹470 crore of revenue. It did turn EBITDA-positive for the first time in FY24, at about ₹38.2 crore, and its CEO has since described the business as profitable at the operating level, though that later claim has not been independently verified against an audited filing.
What businesses does Wow! Momo run besides momos?
The group operates the fried-chicken chain Wow! Chicken, the Indo-Chinese chain Wow! China and the dessert brand Wow! Kulfi alongside its original momo restaurants, plus a packaged frozen-food FMCG line and a HORECA supply business.
Is Wow! Momo planning an IPO?
Management has discussed going public since at least September 2024, when CEO Sagar Daryani spoke of a roughly two-year IPO horizon modelled on Domino’s India’s listed playbook; more recent commentary reported by BusinessWorld ties an eventual listing to hitting ₹1,700–1,800 crore in annual revenue, which the company has said it is targeting for FY29. No IPO date has been formally filed as of this piece.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Business Standard, “QSR chain Wow! Momo raises $23 mn in Series B funding led by Tiger Global” — September 2019
- YourStory, “[Funding alert] Tiger Global-backed Wow! Momo raises over $15 million in Series C” — September 2021
- YourStory, “How QSR startup Wow! Momo innovated amidst the lockdown to survive the COVID-19 crisis” — June 2020
- Exchange4media, “QSR Chain WOW! Momo enters FMCG sector with ready-to-eat momos” — 2021
- Inc42, “Wow! Momo’s FY23 Revenue Cross INR 400 Cr Mark” — May 2024
- Entrackr, “Wow! Momo crosses Rs 400 Cr revenue threshold in FY23” — May 2024
- YourStory, “Wow! Momo Foods secures $49M funding from Malaysia’s Khazanah, Oaks” — January 2024
- Entrepreneur India, “Wow! Momo Secures Rs 75 Crore More in Series D, Valuation Touches Rs 2,838 Crore” — 2025
- Entrackr (Fintrackr), “Wow! Momo posts Rs 470 Cr revenue and Rs 114 Cr loss in FY24” — 2025
- Inc42, “Wow! Momo’s Loss Flat At INR 114 Cr In FY24” — 2025
- Storyboard18, sales-mix and FMCG target reporting on Wow! Chicken, Wow! Momo, Wow! China and Wow! Kulfi FY24 contribution — 2025
- Business Standard, “Wow Momo plans to go public in 2 years, takes cues from Domino’s for IPO” — September 2024
- Deccan Herald, “Wow Momo to go public in 2 years: CEO” — September 2024
- BusinessWorld, “Wow! Momo Aligns IPO Plans With Rs 1,800 Cr Revenue Aim By FY29: Sagar Daryani” — 2025/2026
- Entrackr, “Exclusive: Wow! Momo to raise Rs 110 Cr debt from Anicut Capital” — 2026
- Entrackr, “Exclusive: Wow! Momo to raise Rs 185 Cr debt led by InCred” — 2026
- Deccan Herald, “Kolkata Warehouse Fire: At Least 21 Dead, What We Know” — January/February 2026
- Khaleej Times, “Kolkata fire tragedy: Wow! Momo manager, deputy arrested; Modi announces compensation” — January/February 2026
- ANI, company statement on the Anandapur warehouse fire — January 2026
- Storyboard18, “Anandapur warehouse fire kills three; Wow Momo announces compensation for families” — 2026
- Tracxn, Wow! Momo company profile — funding total, employee count and shareholding data, accessed September 2026
- Earnyatra, “Wow Momo Net Worth 2025: Revenue, Valuation & Founder” — 2025
- Indian Retailer, “Wow! Momo Foods Kicks Off FY26 with 80 New Outlets and Entry into 15 Cities” — 2025
- Petpooja blog, “Wow! Momo Business Strategy: Scaling to 850+ Stores” — 2026
- The Weekend Leader, “Wow! Momo founders Binod Kumar Homagai and Sagar Daryani talk about their success” — founding account
- Trading Economics, USD/INR reference rate — 18 September 2026
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