Meat e-tailer FreshToHome secures $11 mn in Series A funding

Freshtohome Foods Pvt. Ltd, which operates an online platform for ordering meat and fish, has raised $11 million (Rs 76.4 crore at the current exchange rate) in a Series A round of funding led by UAE-based Crescent Enterprises Ventures (CE Ventures).

CE Ventures is the corporate venture capital arm of UAE-based diversified business group Crescent Enterprises.

The startup said in a statement that Das Capital,  Kortschak Investments, TTCER Partners, Al-Nasser Holdings, M&S Partners and other investors based in Silicon Valley and Asia had also participated in the round. Kortschak had backed FreshToHome in the past while the rest are new investors. 

Bengaluru-based FreshToHome said that it will leverage the fresh capital to further strengthen the sourcing supply chain by extending its patent-pending sourcing technology to fishermen and farmers across the country. 

It also plans to expand its footprint by starting operations in Mumbai and Pune. The platform currently caters to Bengaluru, the National Capital Region, Chennai and some places in Kerala, with a customer base of more than 400,000.

“Most of our capital has gone into re-inventing the food supply chain. We currently sell on our platform 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,” said Shan Kadavil, founder and chief executive of FreshToHome.

FreshToHome sells a range of meat and fish products, which it says are free of chemicals. It was founded in 2015 by Kadavil, former country manager at Zynga India, and fish exporter Mathew Joseph. 

Kadavil was among a crop of executives who left online gaming firm Zynga in 2015. Several of those individuals have since gone on to launch their own startups.

In the first quarter of 2016, early-stage investors in Uber including former Google India executive Rajan Anandan wrote the first cheque for FreshToHome. At the time, Kadavil had said the amount was in “single-digit million dollars”.

Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus, Google Ventures’ David Krane and former SoftBank director Pavan Ongole were among the others who invested.

FreshToHome competes with the likes of fellow Bengaluru-based startup Licious, which raised  $25 million (Rs 185 crore then) in a Series D funding round led by Japanese conglomerate Nichirei Corporation last October.  

FreshToHome also faces competition in the form of horizontal e-commerce platforms such as BigBasket, Amazon and Flipkart, while its brick-and-mortar counterparts include Nature’s Basket, which was recently acquired by the Sanjiv Goenka-led Spencer Retail.