Rebel Foods Secures $210 Million Investment Led by Temasek
Rebel Foods, known for its brands like Faasos, Oven Story, and Behrouz Biryani, successfully raised $210 million in December from investors, primarily led by Temasek Holdings, through a combination of secondary share sales and primary capital. This funding round has contributed to the returns of Lightbox’s second fund, which includes a threefold gain from its 2017 exit in Embibe, an AI-driven edtech company acquired by Reliance Industries Limited.
Sandeep Murthy, founder and managing director of Lightbox, stated that the firm has returned approximately one-third of its $100 million second fund to investors, following partial exits from Rebel Foods and Embibe. Lightbox has invested over $26 million in Rebel Foods across several funding rounds. Murthy indicated that it may take an additional three to four years to achieve the targeted balanced returns.
He noted that the current portfolio companies—Rebel, Furlenco, Droom, and Bombay Shirt Company—have well-defined business models. Lightbox’s second fund is expected to yield a total DPI (distributions to paid-in capital ratio) of five times within the next three to four years. DPI measures the total distributions made by a private equity fund to its limited partners relative to their invested amount.
The returns from the second fund also include the gains from Lightbox’s exit from Embibe, where the firm achieved a threefold return with a 35% internal rate of return (IRR) when Reliance acquired its stake in 2017.
As the venture capital ecosystem matures, DPI is becoming the preferred benchmark for assessing fund performance, according to Shapath Parikh, co-founder of White Whale Ventures. He emphasized that investors are increasingly prioritizing the return of capital through exits before committing to future funding, especially in light of recent caution among limited partners due to the collapse of overvalued startups facing losses and governance challenges.
