Seafood Supply Chain Startup Captain Fresh Bags $3 Mn; Looks To Expand Distribution

Freshwater fish and seafood supply chain platform Captain Fresh has raised $3 Mn in a seed funding round led by Matrix Partners India and Ankur Capital. Incubate Fund also participated in the round, along with angel investors Jupitar Money’s Jitendra Gupta and Pine Labs’ Amrish Rau.

Prior to this, Captain Fresh had raised $2.3 Mn last August in Pre-Series A funding round led by Ankur Capital, with participation from Incubate Fund India and Silicon Valley based angel investors.

Captain Fresh was founded by former investment banker Utham Gowda in April 2019. The Bengaluru-based startup supplies fresh water fish and seafood to more than 550 retailers across general and modern trade as well as to online meat and seafood retailers. It will use the fresh capital to deepen its sourcing and distribution network, apart from investing in talent and technology.

The B2B marketplace offers technology solutions for demand-supply matching, e-auctions for sourcing of produce, creating a standardised supply flow as well as maintaining digital traceability across the chain. It has its presences in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Mumbai, Mangaluru and Visakhapatnam.

“We are digitally transforming the highly inefficient fresh fish and seafood supply chain in India by aggregating the fragmented retail demand across the country and linking them to the small fishermen and farmers throughout the Indian coast,” Gowda said in a press release, adding that Captain Fresh has witnessed 10x revenue growth in the last 18 months. The company is close to hitting the $1 million per month revenue milestone.

In terms of competition, Captain Fresh will have to contend with Chennai-based Aquaconnect, which is backed by agritech investors  Omnivore and HATCH as well as the likes of FreshToHome, both of which have raised funding in recent times.

AquaConnect had raised a seed round of $1.1 Mn in September 2019 to build on its big data and artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled mobile application FarmMOJO that advises farmers on their pond operations based on constant monitoring of the pond and other data capture by IoT sensors. Aquaconnect was also a part of Inc42’s agritech startup watchlist for 2020.

In October last year, Bengaluru-based fresh fish and meat supply chain and ecommerce startup FreshToHome raised $121 Mn in a Series C funding round led by Investment Corporation of Dubai (ICD), Investcorp; Ascent Capital, DFC; Allana Group, Iron Pillar and other investors.

Besides this, Captain Fresh also competes with Licious, TenderCuts in the seafood segment. However, these platforms are majorly B2C (business to consumer) brands that deal in meat and seafood.