B2B seafood marketplace Captain Fresh raises $40 mn in round led by Tiger Global and Prosus Ventures
Existing investors Accel India, Matrix Partners India, Ankur Capital, and Incubate Fund also participated in the round.
Captain Fresh, a business-to-business (B2B) seafood marketplace, has raised $40 million (Rs 302 crore) in a Series B investment round led by Tiger Global and Prosus Ventures at a valuation of $200 million (Rs 1,512 crore).
Existing investors Accel India, Matrix Partners India, Ankur Capital, and Incubate Fund also participated in the round.
This round comes months after Captain Fresh raised its Series A round of $12 million at a valuation of $50 million.
Started in April 2019, Captain Fresh focuses on aggregating fragmented retail demand across the country and linking it to small fishermen and farmers.
The startup will use the funds to build deeper tech integrations across the supply and demand-side network such as a real-time trading marketplace, pricing and quality standardisation using artificial intelligence, and the application of robotic automation to move massive volumes.
The company will also be looking to launch in the US and Europe markets by the next quarter and expand in states including Kerala, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal.
Captain Fresh will also utilise the funds towards hiring and expanding its team.
Speaking to Moneycontrol, founder and chief executive Utham Gowda said that the company has grown 6x in the last 12 months and 3x in revenue from July this year.
The company currently works with 2,000 businesses a month, including offline, online retailers, general trade, micro entrepreneurs. “We work with the entire spectrum of retailers and fulfil demands in terms of quality, volume, etc. But, we want to be an open ecosystem and work more with microentrepreneurs,” said Gowda. The company’s reseller segment has grown 20 times within three months of launch, retailing about 1.2 million kg of fish and seafood every month, said the firm.
“We are aggressively expanding our aspirations across all dimensions – products, value chain presence, and markets – to create an institution that could define our generation,” said Gowda.
Elluminate Capital acted as the exclusive financial advisor to Captain Fresh on the transaction.
"Captain Fresh has experienced exponential growth over the last 12 months and this fundraise is a testament to their supply first tech-enabled business model that has helped them scale rapidly while improving economics by optimising for losses and dump in the seafood supply chain," said Sudipto Sannigrahi, Principal, Matrix India.