Zomato also invested $50 million in Magicpin for a 16% stake and $75 million in Shiprocket for an 8% stake. Prior to this, the company invested $100 million in Grofers.
Health and wellness startup Curefit is the 36th startup to enter the unicorn club, after raising $50 million in cash from food delivery app Zomato. The total deal size is $100 million.
A unicorn, in startup parlance, is a company valued at or over a billion dollars. Curefit breached this mark with the latest round and is now valued at $1.5 billion.
Zomato also invested $50 million in Magicpin for a 16% stake and $75 million in Shiprocket for an 8% stake. Prior to this, the company invested $100 million in Grofers.
Curefit’s deal with Zomato is two-way though. Zomato sold sports facilities provider Fitso — which it acquired for $10 million (₹80 crore) in January this year — to Curefit for $50 million. Separately, the publicly listed company also invested an additional $50 million cash in Curefit.
CureFit was last valued at approximately $850-900mn when it signed a deal with Tata Digital for $75mn. CureFit was co-founded in 2016 by Mukesh Bansal (a startup veteran who founded Myntra) and Ankit Nagori, the former chief business officer of Flipkart. As part of the deal with the Tatas, Bansal was inducted on the board of Tata Digital as President. He is playing a key role in the roll out of the Tata Digital superapp as well as future M&As.
Zomato now plans to explore synergies with Curefit, as it looks to ramp up its health food play.
“In order to cultivate a great long-term partnership with Curefit, we are also investing cash in Curefit. Net $50 million cash investment plus value of the Fitso business (worth $50 million) will give us a cumulative shareholding worth $100 million in Curefit (6.4% shareholding in Curefit). This will help us potentially explore cross-selling benefits between Zomato and Curefit, as we see food and health becoming the same side of the coin in the long term,” said Goyal.
In 2020, Curefit Healthcare raised ₹832 crore in a funding round led by Singapore government backed Temasek and other investors such as GableHorn Investments and Ascent Capital. Prior to this, the startup had raised $120 million ( ₹832.6 crore) in its Series D round of funding via equity and debt in 2019. The round was led by existing investors Chiratae Ventures (formerly IDG Ventures India), Accel, Kalaari Capital and Oaktree Capital, Cure Fit said in a statement at the time.
Zomato says that food and health will become the “same side of the coin” going forward, and the two companies could possibly cross promote their products amongst each others’ userbases.
Source: Business World
