[Funding alert] Captain Fresh raises $12M in Series A round led by Accel Partners, Matrix India

Captain Fresh, the B2B tech marketplace for seafood, on Monday said it raised $12 million in a Series A round led by Accel Partners and existing investor Matrix Partners India. Ankur Capital and Incubate Fund also participated in the round.

In fact, the round also saw investment from angel investors, including Jitendra Gupta (Jupiter), Asish Mohapatra and Ruchi Kalra (OfBusiness), Souvik Sengupta (Infra.Market), Rajesh Yabaji (BlackBuck), Revant Bhate (Mosaic Wellness), Ramakanth Sharma (Livspace), and Amrish Rau (PayU).

This is the third funding raised by Captain Fresh in eight months, and the startup will use the capital to continue making deeper investments on the supply-side tech, expand distribution globally, and invest in its team. 

Recently, Abhishek Sudhakar (ex-Senior Director, Myntra) and Venugopal Annamaneni (ex-Head of Engineering, Livspace) have joined the startup's leadership team. 

Utham Gowda, Founder and CEO, Captain Fresh, said, "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 largely 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 cap-table."

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Founded in 2019 by Utham Gowda, Captain Fresh aims to transform the complex fish and seafood supply chain. It believes that this is one of the oldest trades known to humanity, yet it has a high degree of unsolved problems.

Captain Fresh aims to solve this through a combination of a digital commerce platform and a physical fulfilment layer to consistently deliver fair, efficient, and transparent purchase experiences for retailers across multiple formats.

Barath Shankar Subramanian, Partner at 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 standardise the quality, and serving retailers by giving better quality products, higher fill rate, and predictable delivery.”

Captain Fresh is leveraging deep technologies to smoothen the high amount of friction in the traditional fish and seafood trade, optimising the value accrued to the supply communities. It has built best-in-class procurement tech and seafood focussed supply chain, which helps deliver over 20,000 kgs of fresh supplies across 50+ species sourced from more than 30 different coasts every day.

Sudipto Sannigrahi, Vice President, Matrix India, said, “Captain Fresh aims to disrupt the $400 billion global fresh fish and seafood market by creating a tech-enabled B2B supply chain that can 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 it is uniquely positioned to scale profitably across domestic and international markets as a consequence of its tech-driven sourcing and supply chain capabilities.”

Krishnan Neelakantan, Partner at Ankur Capital, said, “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.”