Accel India, Matrix Partners India, Ankur Capital, and Incubate Fund also participated in the round. This is its second fund raise in three months.
The company’s valuation has more than doubled to $500 million following the funding round, Utham Gowda, co-founder and CEO of Captain Fresh, told ET.
A strategic investor is expected to chip in an additional $10 million, a source said.
Gowda did not, however, name the investor.
The fresh funds will be primarily used for acquisitions, he said.
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ETtech“We are looking at various assets which are critical in the global supply chain,” he said. “We are shoring up capital for that purpose. These are mostly distribution focussed assets.”
Captain Fresh started out in 2019 as a seafood marketplace focusing on aggregating the fragmented retail demand across the country and linking it to small fishermen and farmers.
The company raised $40 million in December 2021, also led by Tiger Global and Prosus Ventures.
Its valuation jumped 4x post that funding round to $200 million,
ET reported.
It had also raised $12 million in July last year, led by Accel India.
On the back-to-back funding round, Gowda said the “business quality” had improved significantly since the last quarter and that the company had doubled the annualised revenue run rate for the year from December.
In a previous interaction with ET, Gowda had said that the company had an annualised revenue run rate of $50 million.
Annualised revenue run rate is a projection of upcoming revenue based on what the company clocked during its best performing month.
“What we were doing in December and what we are doing in March is fundamentally a doubling of business. Whatever we committed we are over-delivering,” said Gowda.
Since its previous funding round, the company has not only increased its B2B customers from 1,000 to 2,500, but also expanded its product line to include meat beyond seafood, like red meat.
“On the supply side, from a seafood marketplace, they are now entering into the larger animal protein industry,” said Ashutosh Sharma, head of investments, India, at Prosus Ventures. “On the demand side as well, they have expanded their focus by adding new export markets.”
Gowda said the company has also made significant strides in exports since December with close to 20% of its business now coming from markets outside India.
The United States, European markets, and West Asian countries are the company’s key export markets. The company said it would enter Africa and other Asian markets.
“We have increased our addressable market significantly,” he said. “Last quarter we just had plans for the export market, now there are early signs that we can deliver… We continue to attract capital.”
The company said in a statement that its “vision has now expanded to build a sizeable animal protein platform with a play across multi-channel, multi-geography, multi-specie and multi-format retail (fresh/frozen/live).”
