Pinky Cole’s Bankruptcy Filing Puts a Hard Spotlight on the Rise, Funding, and Financial Strain of Slutty Vegan

The plant-based chain went from viral Atlanta sensation to a reported $100 million brand. Now its founder’s personal Chapter 11 filing is forcing a closer look at how fast growth, investor capital, debt, and overhead collided.

Aisha “Pinky” Cole built Slutty Vegan into one of the loudest, smartest brand stories in American food. What started in 2018 as Instagram orders and food-truck hustle in Atlanta quickly turned into a brick-and-mortar phenomenon with lines down the block, celebrity co-signs, and a menu that made vegan fast food feel less like a lecture and more like a party. Company materials and later interviews say the business reached $4 million in revenue within its first six months, a blistering early pace that helped turn Slutty Vegan into a cultural event as much as a restaurant.

That early momentum converted into real capital. In May 2022, Slutty Vegan announced a $25 million Series A led by Richelieu Dennis’ New Voices Fund and Danny Meyer’s Enlightened Hospitality Investments. Multiple reports said the round valued the company at about $100 million, with the money intended to fund expansion, add executive talent, and build infrastructure for a much larger footprint. ShoppeBlack, citing CNBC Make It estimates, also said Slutty Vegan generated roughly $10 million to $14 million in 2021 revenue, suggesting the company had real top-line traction before the wheels started wobbling.

But the rise came with a punishing cost structure. In a 2025 interview with People, Cole said corporate overhead had climbed to about $10 million. In a separate Fast Company interview, she said the broader debt load had reached about $20 million and that the business was “burning $100,000 every single week.” Industry coverage says Slutty Vegan peaked at 14 locations before the brand was cut back to about six operating locations after restructuring. The story that emerges is not one of weak demand. It is one of demand outrunning discipline, with brand heat unable to fully offset cash burn, complexity, and a swelling corporate machine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DItZpv3cDp8

The company’s 2025 reset was dramatic. Cole said Slutty Vegan went through a restructuring on February 13, 2025, effectively costing her control of the business. Local reporting described it as an Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors, a state-level alternative to bankruptcy in which control of the company and its assets moved to an assignee or estate administrator. Then, on March 28, 2025, Cole bought the brand back under a new entity memorably called Ain’t Nobody Coming to See You, Otis LLC, reclaiming Slutty Vegan’s name and intellectual property and beginning what she branded as “Slutty Vegan 2.0.”

Her personal bankruptcy filing is a separate, though deeply connected, chapter. There is a date discrepancy in public coverage: the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Nation’s Restaurant News say Cole first filed Chapter 13 on January 21, 2026, withdrew it, and then filed personal Chapter 11 on February 12, 2026, in the Northern District of Georgia; People, citing court records, reports March 2, 2026, as the Chapter 11 filing date. What is consistent across outlets is the substance of the filing: the biggest identified debts were about $1.2 million owed to the U.S. Small Business Administration, tied to a COVID-era Economic Injury Disaster Loan, and about $192,000 owed to the Georgia Department of Revenue.

Recent testimony at a creditors’ meeting added more texture to the filing. Business Insider reported that Cole said much of the debt had been personally guaranteed and that “creditors were coming after me.” She also said she had no personal bank account at the time of the hearing and described modest rental income from properties she owns: $1,500 a month from one Georgia property, $1,800 from another, and an expected $3,000 a month from a third lease. The petition estimated both assets and liabilities in the broad range of $1 million to $10 million. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution separately reported that Cole listed roughly $3.7 million in personal property and about $41,700 in monthly expenses.

Taken together, the public record sketches a familiar but still startling modern-business arc: explosive brand lift, investor enthusiasm, aggressive scaling, rising overhead, debt pressure, restructuring, and finally personal reorganization when founder guarantees came home like boomerangs with teeth. Slutty Vegan’s story is not simply that a once-buzzy restaurant hit a rough patch. It is that a founder built a culturally magnetic business, raised serious capital, and still found herself trying to untangle personal liability from a company that had grown faster than its financial scaffolding. That is the real lesson tucked inside the headlines.

On the investor side, the public picture is a little fuzzier than the headlines imply. The clearly named lead investors in the 2022 Series A are New Voices Fund and Enlightened Hospitality Investments. AP and TechCrunch also identify Fearless Fund as a Slutty Vegan backer, but the sources I reviewed did not disclose the size, timing, or instrument of that investment. New Voices now lists Slutty Vegan as an exited portfolio company. In other words, the brand’s funding history is public in outline, but not fully transparent at the investor-by-investor check level. That is why the attached chart marks undisclosed amounts where the record does not support a precise number.