Ratan Tata fund, Silicon Valley angels back CureFit as it goes live

BENGALURU: As CureFit, a healthcare startup founded by former Myntra co-founder Mukesh Bansal and ex-Flipkart senior executive Ankit Nagori, goes live it has raised another $3 million in fresh funding from Tata Sons chairman emeritus Ratan Tata's UC RNT Fund and angel investors from Silicon Valley. The fresh investment comes at a time when the company, which is using a mix of offline and online channels, has just rolled out its services.All told, the one-year old company has picked up $18 million already, making it one of the most well-funded early-stage startups in the country.
UC RNT fund is a venture fund set up by Tata in partnership with the University of California Investments has also made an investment in cab hailing startup Ola.
Gokul Rajaram, product engineering lead at the Jack Dorsey founded payments firm Square, Aditya Agarwal, CTO at file sharing venture, Dropbox along with Facebook's first female engineer, Ruchi Sanghvi participated in this funding round. Shishir Mehrotra, founder of TBD, who was earlier with YouTube, has also invested in Curefit.
The Bengaluru-based startup had earlier raised $15 million from Accel Partners, IDG Ventures and Kalaari Capital in July last year. " We are offering an integrated solution to users in three areas -- fitness, food and mental health. We started off with our fitness offering of Cult which now has 5,000 paid subscribers, " Bansal said.

At present, there are ten Cult fitness centres with plans to expand further in Bengaluru and enter a new city by the end of the year. CureFit had acquired a majority stake in Cult last year which operates gyms and wellness centres. Since then it has made four other acquisitions with the latest being an investment in the online psychotherapy platform Seraniti. "We are meeting several early-stage companies in the health and food space and may look to have them on board if they have the right fit with us " he said. Tribe, Kristys Kitchen, Opinio, a hyper local logistics firm, are the other acquisitions made by the CureFit, so far.
For now, the company is going to keep its operations within Bengaluru this year before offering its services to other major cities in the country.