WayCool Foods raises Rs 120 Cr in equity and debt from LGT Impact, others

The freshly raised funds will be utilised by WayCool to scale up operations across the southern and western parts of India, strengthen its technology platform and reinforce its supply chain.

Agritech startup WayCool Foods has raised a funding of Rs 120 crore, as a combination of equity and debt, in a round led by global impact investor LGT Impact. Other prominent angel investors and institutional lenders including Northern Arc Capital and Caspian also participated in the round.

With the freshly raised funds, the Chennai-based startup will be looking to scale up operations across the southern and western parts of India. The funds will also be utilised to strengthen the company’s technology platform and reinforce its supply chain by building or acquiring assets and capabilities in sourcing, value-added products, and automation of distribution lines.

For the funding round, Veda Corporate Advisors acted as the exclusive financial advisor to WayCool.

Founded in 2015 by Karthik Jayaraman and Sanjay Dasari, WayCool is a fresh produce distribution platform that sources fruits and vegetables from small-hold farmers and aggregators, and sells through multiple distribution channels. Leveraging innovative technology, the company operates its complex supply chain and serves more than 4,000 clients.

On the latest fundraise, Co-founder Sanjay said,

“Along with rapid growth, we have always been committed to profitability, and almost all of our business lines are operationally profitable. We had committed to open and operate three locations after our last institutional fund raise – we are currently operating in 13 locations.”

Over 70 percent of their tonnage is sourced directly from farmers and farming partners, the company said, with all the payments made digitally within three to five days.

“We are committed to solving India’s food supply chain problems while making a substantial positive difference to the farmers and consumers,” added Karthik, Co-founder and CEO of WayCool Foods. “As we continue scaling across product segments, geographies, and business lines, we will continue to raise funds but at the same time remain capital efficient and achieve a quality, mature business at scale by carefully calibrating the stage of the business to the funding needs.”

Before this, the food distribution startup had raised $2.7 million from Aspada Investment Company. Kartik Srivatsa, Managing Partner at Aspada and an earlier investor in WayCool commended the way the company has scaled up since then, especially impressing with their execution capability.

“The company has scaled 20x since the last round of funding with judicious use of capital,” Kartik added.