India's restaurant industry is attracting serious capital, but building a profitable restaurant remains one of the most difficult businesses to crack. According to Lavanya Jayashankar, Founder and CEO of Hotshare, an F&B investment platform, around Rs 10,000 crore was deployed into the F&B business in 2025, while organised food services are expected to account for more than half the market by 2030.

Yet, despite growing consumer demand and investor interest, Lavanya points to an uncomfortable statistic: 80% of restaurants close within their first five years.

Hotshare funds restaurant businesses with a range of Rs 50 lakh to Rs 5 crore. For the investment platform, which raises capital for profitable restaurants and bars at the outlet level, the opportunity is not necessarily to change that statistic, but to identify and fund the businesses that have already demonstrated their ability to survive.

"My play here is to say, let's identify those 20," says Lavanya.

One example is Beyondburg, one of Hotshare’s portfolio companies. The burger brand began in Bengaluru in 2017 as a four-seater kiosk selling 40 to 50 burgers daily. Today, according to co-founder Mohammed Anas, the brand sells approximately 3,000 burgers a day and has just opened its sixth location 

Its journey offers a practical illustration of what Lavanya believes separates a successful restaurant from an attractive but financially unsustainable concept.

India's F&B industry has traditionally attracted two types of capital: institutional investors backing large, scalable chains and informal investors financing individual restaurants through personal networks.

"There is a vast middle of profitable, successful entrepreneurs who are under-capitalized," she says, arguing that investors frequently evaluate restaurant businesses using frameworks borrowed from technology and direct-to-consumer companies.

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