Food services platform Focus Prism raises ₹145 crore from OAKS, buys Chennai-based catering firm FoodExo

Led by founder and managing director Ganesh Panchanathan, Chennai-based FoodExo is a leading corporate catering company serving various industries. Established in 2011, it began with 60 employees serving 1,000 people and has scaled up to more and 2,000 employees serving 150,000 meals per day as of 2025. Panchanathan has been absorbed into Focus Prism following the acquisition, and is now head of operations - south at the firm.

Market opportunity

OAKS typically backs experienced entrepreneurs in large, secular markets where a good business can compound through scale and operating performance rather than through repeated capital raising. “What attracted us here was the combination of a highly fragmented industry, an experienced founder, and a technology and process platform that can bring consistency, visibility and discipline to a business that has historically been fragmented,” Anand said.

The investment firm is currently deploying from its second fund, about ₹1,000 crore in size and raised in 2022. Its previous fund, raised in 2017-18, was about ₹700 crore in size. It has backed consumer-facing companies including Foodlink, InCred, CredAble, Shree, TrooGood, Keus and Wow! Momo across two funds.

Broadly, the institutional food services market in India is over ₹60,000 crore in size, with the top three players controlling just about 11% of the market, according to a note shared by OAKS. Large institutional food services companies such as Sodexo and the Compass Group have demonstrated how the industry has scaled over time.

Growth strategy

Focus Prism will also follow a similar trajectory of acquiring and integrating high-quality regional, specialist family-run operators where it sees a strategic fit. The strategy will involve bringing businesses onto a common management, technology and procurement framework and will use technology, data, processes, key performance indicators, food-cost discipline, quality and compliance to create repeatability.

The company operates in more than 25 cities with over 65 kitchens under management. After the acquisition, it has a projected revenue of about ₹700 crore in the current fiscal year and over ₹1,500 crore by FY30.

“India has a very large institutional food-services market, but much of it has historically been built around fragmented operators, manual processes, and local execution,” Suryanarayanan said. “Our ambition is to bring technology, process, procurement, quality and operating discipline together on one platform and then use that platform to build scale, both organically and through consolidation.”

With over three decades of experience across food and hospitality, he has worked across hotel and food service operations, with depth in costing and food cost management. He has worked as an independent consultant with many food businesses including Sri Krishna Sweets and Adyar Ananda Bhavan on food cost performance and operating efficiency.

Priyamvada C

Priyamvada is a Mumbai-based business journalist at Mint. She writes about the public and private markets with a key focus on venture capital, private equity, M&As and private credit. Her coverage also spans startups and emerging businesses.Over the last two years, she has uncovered some of the largest deals and interviewed important decision-makers from India’s investment ecosystem. She likes to dabble across different formats like long forms and explainers. Her work has been consistently displayed on the publication's deals page, and she has also written multiple front-page stories.Prior to joining Mint in 2024, she worked out of Reuters’ Bengaluru bureau where she extensively covered the travel, transportation, and logistics industries. Across both her stints, Priyamvada has displayed rigour for breaking news and analyzing interesting data-driven trends. She holds a postgraduate diploma from the Asian College of Journalism's Bloomberg programme. In her free time, she enjoys reading books and trying out different cuisines. She is keen to delve deeper into the various sectors she covers and is always up for a chat. You can reach out to her at priyamvada.c@livemint.com.

Sneha Shah

Sneha Shah is the editor for deals and startups at Mint. Starting off her career in India’s financial capital as a cub reporter for the Mid-day newspaper in the mid-2000s, she later moved on to decode balance sheets and follow the money trail for some of the leading pink publications in the country. She has been covering India’s deals ecosystem for nearly two decades now, closely tracking private- and public-market funding, startups, private equity, venture capital, and investment banking. From breaking some of the biggest deal stories of the past to doing some incisive deep-dives into the latest trends and turnarounds in the industry, she has witnessed the phenomenal growth and transformation of the country’s investment ecosystem from really close quarters. A graduate in journalism, she has worked with The Economic Times, Financial Chronicle, VCCircle and Mid-Day before starting her second stint at Mint in 2022. As a keen observer of India’s startups ecosystem, she aspires to write a book some day, chronicling some of the most inspiring stories the industry has seen so far in its remarkable journey.