Daybreak - Bansal chased vision. Nagori chased output. Public markets seem to prefer butter chicken over burpees

Episode Date: August 4, 2025

Ankit Nagori and Mukesh Bansal may have started the fitness unicorn Cult.Fit together, but their journeys since then are a study in contrasts.On one hand is Cult.Fit. It's been a little over a year since Mukesh Bansal stepped down as Cult’s CEO. When The Ken reached out to him asking why, he clarified that he still remains involved. But involvement, of course, is a spectrum – sometimes it means steering the company to an IPO. The catch is that while Cult.fit wants to go public next year, there is no DRHP yet. There is also no FY25 data on the Ministry of Corporate Affairs website. Then you have Nagori’s big bet – Cure.Foods. Under Nagori’s leadership, Curefoods went from 2 crore in revenue in FY21 to 775 crore in FY25. That’s according to its draft IPO documents filed in June. Yup, Curefoods is also looking to go public. But unlike Cult, Nagori has a DRHP, a valuation, and a business that sells things people eat. While Eat.fit was all about quinoa and millets, Curefoods evetnually became about what sells. After all, the focus was to scale. Tune in. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

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Ankit Nagori and Mukesh Bansal may have started the fitness unicorn cult fit together. But their journeys since then are a study in contrast. On one hand is cult fit. It's been a little over year since Mokesh Bansel stepped down as the CEO. When the Ken reached out to him asking why, he clarified that he still remains involved.

But involvement, of course, is a spectrum. Sometimes it means steering the company towards an IPO. Now, the catch is that while CultFit wants to go public next year, there is no DHRP yet. There is also no FY25 data on the Ministry of Corporate Affairs website. And then you have Nagori's big bet, Cure Foods. Quick history lesson, Cure Foods was originally EatFit, the in-house health food startup of CureFit Healthcare, which was once the parent company from which both cult and cure foods eventually spun out.

Under Nagori's leadership, Cure Foods went from 2 crores in F.Y21 to 775 crores in FY25. Now that is according to its draft IPO documents which were filed in June this year. Yes, Cure Foods is also looking to go public. But unlike cult, Nagori has a DHRP, a valuation and a business that sells things that people eat. While EatFit was all about Kinoa and Millets, Cure Foods eventually became about what sells. After all, the focus was to scale. So today, EatFit is just one of over 20 brands under the Cure Foods umbrella, which now sells everything from millet bowls to

crispy crem donuts. It started out as a wellness vertical and it turned into a roll-up machine, but the numbers got the memo. Over at CultFit by Contra, us, the model is harder to explain and even harder to scale. Revenue crossed 1,000 crore rupees in the financial year 2024, but so did the losses, 850 crores that year, after 600 crores the last year before. Bansel, however, claims that a corner has been turned. In his email, he said that FY25 losses are down, growth is steady, and profitability is somewhere on the calendar. Cult, he added, halved both EBITA and P8. or profit after tax losses in the financial year 2025.

Now, if you leave out the 319 crore non-cash impairment charge from FY24, the numbers do look a bit better. By the way, a non-cash impairment is an accounting adjustment where a company reduces the value of an asset on its books because it is no longer worth as much before. But no actual cash leaves the company. So you see what I mean about contrasts. Nagori runs a logistics optimized food.

tech. Bansal runs gyms, trainers and subscription content in a country where 0.2% of adults paid for gym memberships and most end up canceling in under five months. Clearly, Bansal chased the vision and Nagori chased output. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Nidda Sharma, and I don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rahal Philippos and I will come to you with one business story that is worth understanding, and worth your time. Today is Tuesday, the 5th of August.

Mokesh Pansal has always told good stories. First with Mintra, then Flipkart, then Tata Digital, and now with his entry into AI. Unfortunately, good stories don't necessarily translate into cash flow. But he does have the founder credentials down cold. And that's what happens when you build a bunch of lucrative exits. But what hasn't been too hot has been execution. that is the big difference between Bansal and Nagori.

Because while Bansal built brands, Nagori spent the last few years building steadily towards IPO readiness. People who have worked closely with Bansel describe him as a big canvas guy. Visionary, go-to-market strategies, category-creating plays, strong investor relationships, but not someone who gets into the operational weeds.

He is great at imagining vertical integration, but struggles with ground. level execution is how one cult executive put it. A senior executive remembers the Mintra transition from web to app as a case study in chaos. Hiring, firing, indecision, lots of vertical, not much integration. He told us how his job at Mintra was to look at certain data. But there were times when he ended up driving lorries personally to the warehouses. Bottom line is, too big to fail has always been Bansal.

motto. And when ambition outpaces execution, investors tend to step in and take on the burden. Tiger Global and Axel rescued Mintra in 2013. Tiger stepped in for cult during COVID. Cure Foods was eventually spun out. Axel, Tiger Global, Kalari Capital, Chirate Ventures, all long-term allies of Bansal invested in both Mintra and cult. Axel has even backed Bunsle's latest AI venture, Nurex. Whether it was Mintra where he spotted fashion as the next big e-commerce wave or cult where he attempted to digitize the gym experience or now Nurex, riding the AI hype, Bunsell's eye for big trends has never been in question. The cult executive that we just spoke about recalled how Bunsell reimagined gym and yoga membership. He sold them like products.

But that is how cult stood apart intuitively. yet profitability and sustainability have always been elusive. In fact, if you think about it, across all his ventures, the one thing that stands out is that Bunsell has still not managed to build a single profitable company. Now, India's fitness economy is large in theory and tricky in practice. It is an 8-lac-crawl or 98-billion dollar market according to strategy consulting firm Redseo. But most of that spending comes from the richest 30.

25% of Indians. The average Indian's annual fitness spend lies somewhere between 4,000 to 10,000 rupees. Besides, gym penetration is just a 10th of the US rate. And among those who do join, 80% quit within the first five months. Renewals are typically rare because most people sign up only to learn the basics and then go solo. So, Carl did what many growth stage companies do. It pivoted. From owning fitness centers to franchising them. It may be. move to franchisee-owned franchisee-operated and franchisee-owned company-operated models. Today, it runs over 700 gyms and 17 cult-spot stores across formats. Cult has also shifted focus from fitness services to fitness products.

Now, it is taking on decathlon. It has realized that the gear market is growing steadily, and that might take cult from 1x to 2x. But the thing is, VCs want 10x. And to succeed further, cult would have to go public. at a competitive price. Bunsell, according to the former executive, perhaps saw the limits early. He saw where Kalt was headed after COVID,

and that is why he tried to forge a deal with Tata Digital, a Flipkart Mintra redux of sorts, but it did not materialize. However, Bunsal maintains that Kalt continues to be a part of the Tata ecosystem and is listed on the Tata new app even today. And since then, he stayed busy. He brought in backers like Zomato, he co-founded Liz Graft, a fashion and retail innovation firm in 2023 with Zamato's co-founder and Make My Trips ex-C CEO Mohit Gupta.

In 2024, he launched Nurex, a conversational AI startup. Meanwhile, Krishna Swami took over as the CEO at CureFit Healthcare. Bansal remains the largest individual shareholder at Kalt, but in terms of operations, the centre of gravity has clearly shifted. More on this in the next segment. Stay tuned. The ken spoke to Umeh Shandra Palaywal of Unlisted Zone. He described Nagori as a deeply hands-on person.

He said he's aggressively scaling kitchens, acquiring brands and expanding to new geographies. He pointed out that shows clarity, confidence and that is what IPO investors care about. But they also tend to notice when that is missing. Compared to that, Palewal says Buncel's attention seems divided. Bunsal, meanwhile, disagrees. In his email to the ken, he stated that he was still executive chairman, deeply engaged in long-term strategy, IPO journey and new initiatives. But while Bunsell promises vision, Nagori is delivering output.

Kure Foods now runs five central kitchens and more than 500 service locations across 70-plus cities. It is not without issues, though. The company has eight criminal proceedings against its directors. attrition is over 100% too. Still, investors seem willing to look past the churn. Cure Foods lost raise funds at a 3,800-craw-rupy valuation, implying a market cap to sales ratio of 5.3 times, which is pretty decent for a consumer-facing brand, according to Paliwal.

Both Cure Foods and Calt, for all their differences, share one thing. They've grown by acquiring their way forward. But cure foods with a smaller footprint and less complexity has seen fewer hiccups, fewer restructures, fewer complaints and more consistency. But to be fair, Kalt still has the stronger brand. It is the OG fitness platform here in India, which means national recall value. They made fitness accessible to lacks of people who had never even stepped into a gym. But while visibility matters, Kalt is struggling to push past that. India's wellness market may be large, but it is also top-heavy, fragmented and culturally uphill.

You cannot build an IPO case on willpower. Food, on the other hand, just needs hunger. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings. A full subscription unlocks daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and podcast extra. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on top of the Ken website. Today's episode was hosted by Snigda Sharma and edited by Rajiv Siyah.