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Dave’s Hot Chicken sold for $1 billion just eight years after starting in an LA parking lot
Dave’s Hot Chicken fried chicken chain has been acquired by Roark Capital for about $1 billion
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Angelenos may be feeling a stab of hometown pride for the once-scrappy young founders of Dave’s Hot Chicken, which announced on Monday that it was being acquired by private equity firm Roark Capital in a deal valued at around $1 billion.
(The actual number was not disclosed, but Dave’s Hot Chicken CEO Bill Phelps told CNBC it was “pretty close.")
The story is fairly well-known: in 2017, three young friends got together (Dave Kopushyan, the Dave of the operation, Arman Oganesyan and Tommy Rubenyan, later joined by brother Gary), spent $900 to set up a food stand in a parking lot in L.A. with portable fryers, folding tables and coolers.
Using their own specially-created recipe, they made some great tasting hot chicken… so good that Eater L.A. ran a story headlined “East Hollywood’s New Late-Night Hot Chicken Stand Might Blow Your Mind”.
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The lines showed up the next day and never stopped.
In time, high profile celebrities like Drake and Samuel L. Jackson came in as investors, and there’s now more than 300 restaurants in the U.S., with locations also in the Middle East and Europe. One can imagine there may be many more around the world some time soon.
We salute you, our homegrown heroes. Even with an addictive product, that’s a sizzling deal to pull off.
Updated June 3, 2025 at 3:23 PM PDT
Updated to show the names of all the founders.
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But the game has changed: Congress voted to eliminate funding for public media across the country. Here at LAist that means a loss of $1.7 million in our budget every year. We want to assure you that despite growing threats to free press and free speech, LAist will remain a voice you know and trust. Speaking frankly, the amount of reader support we receive will help determine how strong of a newsroom we are going forward to cover the important news in our community.
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