In July 2025, Jaydeep Barman handed the chief executive's job to a colleague and took a different title: chairman and group CEO. The man who had started Rebel Foods stepped back from running it day to day, and Ankush Grover, a co-founder who had run the India business, became global CEO. Observers read the move as the kind of governance tidying that comes before a stock-market listing.
The company they were preparing to list began in 2011 as a single bet. Faasos was a delivery-only food brand, at a time when most Indian restaurants thought of delivery as an afterthought. Barman and Kallol Banerjee were its co-founders, and the idea was simple: if the customer never walks in, the restaurant does not need a dining room.
Faasos was a delivery-only food brand, at a time when most Indian restaurants thought of delivery as an afterthought.
That logic took four years to harden into a business. In 2015 the company opened its first cloud kitchen, a kitchen that only cooks for delivery. In 2016 it went cloud-kitchen-only. Then came the part that made it unusual. Instead of one brand per kitchen, Rebel began running many brands from the same kitchens: biryani, pizza, bowls, desserts. By 2025 the portfolio had grown past 45 brands, among them Behrouz Biryani, Oven Story Pizza and The Good Bowl.
Partnerships followed. In December 2020 it signed with Wendy's to run 250 cloud kitchens in India, and in February 2022 it took the master franchise rights for Wendy's offline restaurants too. Investors noticed. A 2021 round valued the company at $1.4 billion, with Coatue, Sequoia, Lightbox and the Qatar Investment Authority among the backers.
The price of that growth was paid in losses. Rebel lost INR 656 crore on revenue of INR 1,195 crore in FY23. Fast food delivery is a thin-margin business, and a rival executive told Inc42 in 2025 that a clear timeline to EBITDA breakeven had yet to emerge. Managing dozens of brands is its own burden, with capital and attention spread across all of them. Rivals such as Curefoods and Wow! Momo kept pressing, and the company's February 2025 push into 15-minute delivery, QuickiES, reportedly had not yet found much of a following.
Still, the numbers have moved the right way. In FY25 operating revenue rose about 14% to INR 1,617 crore and the net loss narrowed to INR 337 crore, from INR 380 crore the year before. Reports for FY26 put the loss near INR 282 crore on revenue of about INR 1,952 crore, and the company is reportedly eyeing a public listing.
The lesson is in the sequence. Rebel did not start as a platform. It started with one brand and one stubborn idea about delivery, and only after the idea proved itself did it turn into a system that other brands could ride on.