Curefoods Pvt Ltd, a cloud kitchen startup floated by Cure.fit cofounder Ankit Nagori, on Friday said it has acquired seven food brands just months after it bagged its Series A funding round.
The brands it acquired include subscription-based home-cooked meals MasalaBox, all-day Indian breakfast meals brand Paratha Box, online confectionary chain Cake Zone, biryani brand Ammi’s Biryani and online ‘chaat’ brand Chaat Street, said Curefoods in a statement.
With this acquisition, Curefoods has 10 brands besides exclusive online franchising rights for three brands namely YumLane, Sharief Bhai, and Aligarh House, it added.
The startup has already signed 15 more letters of intent (LOIs). It typically follows a 21-day period of end-to-end closure while on-boarding such brands, it explained.
Curefoods' Nagori said that the company aims to make good food easily accessible at affordable prices.
"Given the accelerated growth of cloud kitchens in India, especially since the pandemic, we want to leverage our market expertise and advanced technology in order to elevate and amplify the experiences these brands offer," he added.
Gokul Kandhi, business head, Curefoods, said that it will start doubling down on improving scale, operations, technological integration, and marketing for the acquired brands.
"We are already seeing some of these companies grow much faster with us than they did before the pandemic," he added.
Earlier in August, CureFoods had raised $13 million (Rs96.2 crore) as part of its Series A funding round led by mid-stage-focused venture capital firm Iron Pillar.
Curefoods joins a growing list of ventures which have come up with a view to acquiring direct-to- consumer (D2C) brands or third-party sellers on e-commerce platforms such as Amazon to create a large portfolio of businesses.
Some of them have already raised their first institutional cheques such as Flipkart-backed GOAT Brand Labs; Mensa Brands, floated by former Myntra and Medlife CEO Ananth Narayan; and SoftBank-backed FirstCry’s GlobalBees, which is in talks to raise fresh capital a $1 billion valuation, VCCircle reported earlier this week.
In August, Presight Capital and an undisclosed global hedge fund led a $42.5 million Series A round of funding in Gurugram headquartered UpScalio which aggregates and invests in e-commerce brands.