B2B seafood marketplace Captain Fresh said that it has raised $12 million in a Series A investment round led by Accel, along with the participation from existing investors Matrix Partners India, Ankur Capital, as well as, Incubate Fund.
This transaction marks the third funding for the company in a span of eight months. With this infusion of capital, Captain Fresh said it make deeper investments in supply-side tech, expand distribution globally and continue to invest behind their team.
Founded in 2019 by Utham Gowda, Captain Fresh focus on aggregating the fragmented retail demand for seafood across the country and linking them to the small fishermen and farmers throughout the Indian coast.
The company claims that it works with more than 600 businesses across various retail formats in more than 10 Indian cities, delivering more than 20,000 Kgs of fresh supplies across 50 species sourced from more than 30 different coasts on an everyday basis.
“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 realized the imminent need for a full-stack approach as several microstructures within this market are completely broken, opaque and unreliable,” said Gowda.
Barath Shankar Subramanian, Partner, Accel said, “The fresh fish and seafood market in India is characterised by a huge supply-demand mismatch, varied quality standards, fragmented channels and numerous other issues. Captain Fresh is targeting this fragmented supply base, aggregating the supply through technology, using scale, and technology to standardize the quality, and serving retailers by giving better quality products, higher fill rate, and predictable delivery. We believe this opportunity can be massive and the team has executed phenomenally from an early stage.”
“We are very pleased to see the rapid progress that Captain Fresh has made since our initial investment. The market opportunity in fresh fish and seafood is huge. With a stronger team and key elements of tech being built out, we are excited about the journey ahead for Captain Fresh as it sets out to build a pioneering commerce platform in this space,” said Krishnan Neelakantan, Partner at Ankur Capital.
“Captain Fresh aims to disrupt the $400B global fresh fish and seafood market by creating a tech-enabled B2B supply chain that is able to deliver better quality at competitive prices with a focus on reduction in wastage. The company has grown rapidly over the last 12 months and we believe that they are uniquely positioned to scale profitably across domestic and international markets as a consequence of their tech-driven sourcing and supply chain capabilities. We welcome Accel to the partnership and look forward to the next phase of growth,” said Sudipto Sannigrahi, Vice President, Matrix India
