Jaydeep Barman

Jaydeep Barman is the co-founder, Chairman and Group CEO of Rebel Foods, widely described as the world's largest cloud-kitchen (internet restaurant) platform. Born and raised in Kolkata, he trained as a mechanical engineer at IIT Kanpur, earned a Master's in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US, and completed an MBA at INSEAD, where he made the Dean's List. Before entrepreneurship he spent roughly 2006–2010 as an Associate Partner at McKinsey & Company in London, where he says he "knew how to build businesses" by the time he returned to India.

Barman first started Faasos in Pune in 2004 with his college friend and co-founder Kallol Banerjee — originally out of a shared craving for good Kolkata-style rolls — before formally relaunching the venture in 2011. Their first institutional cheque came from Sequoia Capital, a ~$2M round famously secured via a cold email pitching the "Domino's of Indian food." Faasos pivoted from physical quick-service outlets to a cloud-kitchen model around 2015–2016, and in 2018 rebranded to Rebel Foods to reflect a multi-brand virtual-restaurant platform.

Today Rebel Foods runs brands such as Faasos, Behrouz Biryani, Oven Story Pizza, The Good Bowl, Sweet Truth and Mandarin Oak across 70+ cities and international markets including the UAE, Indonesia and the UK, operating thousands of cloud kitchens. The company has raised roughly $580M+ across many rounds from investors including Sequoia/Peak XV, Goldman Sachs and Coatue, reaching unicorn status. For FY2024 it reported revenue of about ₹1,420 crore with narrowed losses of ~₹378 crore.

Alongside running Rebel Foods, Barman is an active founder-angel, with a portfolio of roughly 8–9 startups spanning consumer, food, health-tech and hospitality, and he has served on startup boards (e.g., Reccy).

• Invests as an operator-angel, typically writing early/seed cheques into founder-led consumer, D2C-food and digital-health companies — sectors adjacent to his own operating expertise.
• Contrarian by conviction: "I have this fundamental belief that you make abnormal returns not when you are right but when people don't agree with you."
• Brand-first thinking shapes what he backs — he stresses that a brand solving one narrow "single-serve value" won't win the broader occasion, favoring businesses with clear positioning and repeat demand.
• Operations- and process-driven: frames execution as decomposable systems ("every cooking process is a combination of ingredients, dispensing, temperature and movement"), suggesting he values founders who can systematize and scale.
• Tends to co-invest alongside other prominent Indian operator-angels (e.g., Kunal Shah, Jitendra Gupta, Sahil Barua) in syndicated rounds.