Born in Madhepura, Bihar in 1999 as the youngest of three siblings, to a home maker mother and a father in the BSF, Deepak Kumar is the founder CEO of Wah! Foods, the parent entity behind Wah! Puchka and Wah! Litti.
Completing his schooling in Purnea and Patna, he arrived in Kolkata for his BTech in Civil Engineering at Heritage Institute of Technology. An inveterate street food junkie, Deepak consumed all that Kolkata is famous for, from jhal muri to rolls to puhkas (variously called Golguppas and Pani Puri elsewhere) and more. Before long, he developed a dry cough that bothered him every night, all night. Visiting multiple doctors, who prescribed various treatments for various allergies, but still suffering from his dry cough, he walked into a polyclinic late one evening even as the doctors were leaving. After hearing about his condition, the doctor on duty asked whether he consumed a lot of puchkas! She then proceeded to inform him about the health problems suffered by other serious puchka devourers. The doctor also prescribed medicines that helped Deepak overcome the cough.
Then Covid struck. During the pandemic with no college to attend, he decided to visit puchkas sellers to understand how they made their puchkas. To gain access and as a token of appreciation, he offered to teach them for about 30min each day for 10 days. And the unhygienic and unsanitary conditions in which they produced their puchkas, from the oil, water, flour, horrified Deepak.
Unwilling to give up on his favourite street foods, he therefore decided to start his own puchkas made in a hygienic and sanitary manner without sacrificing taste. The latter was key. The dominant lore of there being an inverse correlation between the taste and the hygiene conditions of producing any Indian street food had to be proven wrong.
Wah! Puchka
He started selling puchkas online with the puchka, pani, alu fillings all being made by him at home and delivered using Swiggy and Zomato. He rented a flat for this purpose and requisitioned the part time services of a chef from his college hostel.
Deepak then enrolled for a MSc in Food Tech and Processing at Kolkata’s Jadavpur University and a MBA course at St Xavier’s College even as he was rolling out and testing his puchka business. He started with one kitchen and one store spending Rs 20,000 on rent, deposit, FSSAI and Trade licenses, ovens and ran this for 6months. With a focus on maintaining profitability and catering to customer needs, he launched Wah! Litti catering to the large Bihari population in Kolkata that craved litti chokha, the popular street food of Bihar.
Graduating in 2024, Deepak today runs 11 outlets in Kolkata serviced by 1 central kitchen that prepares and delivers, using a company vehicle, ready-to-prepare-and-serve puchkas and litti. With big aspirations, Deepak is now expanding into Pune. His reasons for choosing Pune are that it is a fast growing city, low costs that are comparable to Kolkata’s, and has a population segment that is used to Bengali and Bihari street food.
Funding
In 2024, Deepak convinced Sagar Daryani, co-founder and CEO of Wow! Momo and a college alum, to invest in his company. This was part of a Rs 75L angel round. Earlier this year in 2025, he closed a 1.02cr angel funding round that included Rs 30L from overseas investors. Approaching potential investors on LinkedIn (he has an intern sending out 50 mails a day and with an active social media presence), experienced angels like Suyash Saraf of Dot & Key skin care and Abhishek Rungta of Indus Net Technologies were excited enough to participate in this round enhancing the credibility of Deepak’s company.
With a team of 11, including himself overseeing strategy, finance, marketing, operations, quality, training, and a store operations team of 40, this 52 person company is doing Rs 40L/month today.
Deepak Kumar is now looking to raise his first VC round of Rs 3crore.
Aspirations
Deepak has big dreams. He sees an immense opportunity to create the Haldiram’s of Indian Street Food with a House of Brands approach, similar to Rebel Foods, with the technology and process infrastructure of a McDonald’s to ensure quality and consistency of products. With the parent Wah! Foods owning a portfolio of individual distinct brands such as Wah! Puchka and Wah! Litti that offer products for different customer segments. He sees Wah! Jhal Muri, Wah! Chholay Bhature, Wah! Bhel Puri and even Wah! Dosas on the horizon as he scales up. With growing acceptance of Indian street food and with funding becoming easier, he believes that Wah! Foods can achieve for Indian street food in a decade what took Haldiram’s many decades to build its brand just on the backs of soan-papdi and bhujias that deliver 70% of its top line today leaving 30% for Indian street food!
Winning an award from Zomato for being among the top 10 Fast Food and Snacks category in Kolkata within 2 years of starting motivates Deepak to strive for more. He is now also a committee member of NRAI, Kolkata. For a company in this category and at this stage, he has invested in software for inventory and payroll and even allotted 5% ESOP to his team.
He sees the ability to hire top talent and getting them to become productive as his key challenge.
Advice
- Stay consistent and authentic to your objectives and purpose.
- There’s no substitute for hard work. Be open to learning and doing all jobs. I learnt how to make puchkas, to quality control, to technology to funding
- Always remain humble and honest
Very valuable advice to all!
