Seafood Marketplace Captain Fresh Bags $12Mn In Series A Round Led By Accel

B2B seafood market firm Captain Fresh on Monday (July 19)  announced to have raised $12 Mn in its Series A round led by Accel along with the participation from existing investors Matrix Partners India, Ankur Capital, as well as, Incubate Fund. The investment round in the tech-enabled B2B seafood marketplace also included participation from marquee angel investors such as Souvik Sengupta (Infra.Market), Rajesh Yabaji (BlackBuck), Revant Bhate (Mosiac Wellness), among others.

The Bengaluru-based startup will utlise the fresh capital to invest on supply-side tech, expand distribution globally and continue to invest behind their team.

Founded in 2019 by Utham Gowda, the company claims to have grown 10 times in the last 18 months and at present is working more than 600 businesses across various retail formats in over 10 cities. Captain Fresh boasts of delivering 20,000 kgs of fresh supplies of more than 50 species sourced from more than 30 different coasts on a daily basis.

Commenting on the investment  Gowda, who is the chief executive officer and founder, Captain Fresh, said, “After spending close to 5 years covering the international seafood industry, I was intrigued by the level of supply deficiency in the trade. Clearly, I saw a slam dunk opportunity in creating an India-based supplier-first commerce platform given its position amongst the top 3 fish and seafood producers, globally. Along the way, we realised the imminent need for a full-stack approach as several microstructures within this market are completely broken, opaque and unreliable. Over the last 24 odd months, we have iterated and fine-tuned the playbook for efficiently aggregating demand and supply, validated by a 10x growth spurt through the pandemic. We are thrilled to find ourselves at this unique intersection of a large unsolved problem, a highly capital efficient business model and backed by a high quality investor set. We are privileged to have Accel join Matrix, Ankur, Incubate, ADB Ventures and others on our captable. This funding event is a vote of confidence for us to continue to commit serious resources behind making ‘seafood product’ the true ‘Captain of our ship’.

The Matrix-backed firm marks the latest capital infusion as the third investment in the past eight months. Earlier in the month of March, Captain Fresh raised $3Mn in a seed funding round led by Matrix Partners India and Ankur Capital. Jupiter Money’s Jitendra Gupta along with Pine Labs’ Amrish Rau also participated in the round.

Captain Fresh directly competes against the likes of  AquaConnect which last week raised funding worth $4 Mn led by Rebright Partners and Flourish Ventures. The Chennai-based company is a full stack aquaculture technology venture that provides data-driven farm advisory and marketplace solutions to fish and shrimp farmers through artificial intelligence and satellite remote sensing technologies. Other major players in the segment are Licious, which bagged $192 Mn in Series F round earlier this month, FreshToHome, a series C funded startup and TenderCuts, which again earlier this year raised $15 Mn of fresh funding. However, most of these startups are in the B2C segment unlike Captain Fresh.

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