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Meat e-tailer FreshToHome.com receives series A funding led by CE Ventures
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Saturday, 01 June, 2019, 13 : 00 PM [IST]
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Our Bureau, Bengaluru
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FreshToHome.com, India’s largest e-commerce company for fresh meat and fish delivery, has received Series A funding, led by CE Ventures with participation from Das Capital, Kortschak Investments, TTCER Partners and other Asia- and Valley-based Investors. Tarun Khandelwal of the UAE-based Add Advisory Partners was the advisor to the company on the round. The Series A deal concluded in mid-2018.
The Bengaluru-based online store, which delivers fresh, chemical-free seafood and meat to your doorstep, was founded in the year 2015, and is currently present in four cities - Bengaluru, NCR (Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, Faridabad, Ghaziabad and Greater Noida), Chennai and Kerala (Kochi, Trivandrum, Kozhikode and Thrissur), with over 4,00,000 customers and growing. With the brand promise of 100 per cent fresh, zero per cent chemicals, FreshToHome guarantees safe-to-eat products.
The Series A funding was led by CE Ventures, the corporate venture capital platform of the UAE-headquartered global conglomerate, Crescent Enterprises. CE Ventures invests across technology domains, including supply chain technology, medtech, fintech and other niche consumer-focussed and enterprise SaaS technologies.
Investments of CE-Ventures include Uber, Pinterest, and more recently, EdCast, a Silicon Valley-based company known for its pioneering AI-powered Knowledge Cloud solution, the UAE-based global smart kitchen network, Kitopi, that cooks and delivers on behalf of restaurants; and the India-based online furniture subscription platform, Furlenco.
Other participants in the round included Das Capital of Japan, Al-Nasser Holdings and Abdul Azeez Al-Ghurair from the UAE, M&S Partners from Singapore, Kortschak Investments, PLB Holdings and TTCER partners from the Valley.
FreshToHome.com is using the funding to further strengthen the sourcing supply chain by extending its patent-pending sourcing technology to fishermen and farmers across India.
FreshToHome also plans on expanding to new geographies such as Mumbai and Pune, apart from its current operations in Bengaluru, NCR, Kerala and Chennai.
Shan Kadavil, founder and chief executive officer, FreshToHome.com, said, “India’s perishable food supply chain is riddled with middlemen, leading to quality issues by the end consumers, due to additives such as preservatives and chemicals, while exploiting the farmers and fishermen of fair price.”
“We are disrupting the food supply chain in India, with our patent pending commodities exchange technology offering food that is free of added chemicals to end consumers and a fair price to the producers,” he added.
“Most of our capital has gone into re-inventing the food supply chain. We currently sell on our platform meat and fish sourced from over 1,500 fishermen and farmers, using our state-of-the-art technology backed with cold chain infrastructure, a fleet of dedicated refrigerated trucks, using the hub-and-spoke distribution model from four large processing factories to ensure traceability and food safety,” he added.
Speaking on the investment, Tushar Singhvi, director, CE Ventures, said, “The meat and seafood segment in India is pegged to be a $50-billion market, but we have to keep in mind that it is a highly fragmented industry.”
“FreshToHome.com is not only trying to streamline the industry, but they are also using technology to revolutionise the way the industry functions by disintermediating the supply chain, eliminating the middlemen and working directly with the fishermen and farmers in a marketplace model, to make fresh and chemical-free food accessible to the masses at large,” he added.
“It is a very robust model and a sustainable mission, and we are extremely proud to back Kadavil and his team on this journey,” he added.
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