Indian B2B seafood and meat marketplace startup Captain Fresh has more than doubled its valuation to $500 million since the beginning of the year following a $50 million Series C round.
The founding round — led by existing investors Prosus Ventures and Tiger Global, along with Accel India, Matrix Partners India, Ankur Capital, and Incubate Fund — will allow the company to make acquisitions, CEO and co-founder Utham Gowda said in a Monday (March 7) Economic Times report.
“We are looking at various assets which are critical in the global supply chain,” he said. “We are shoring up capital for that purpose,” he said, adding the assets are largely distribution focused.
Captain Fresh first launched three years ago, serving as a seafood marketplace that focused on aggregating the disparate retail throughout India and linking it to smaller fishermen and farms.
“For centuries, the fish and seafood industry has stayed the same with very little innovation, and we have a unique opportunity to revolutionize the sector utilizing technology,” Gowda said last year, after the company raised $40 million in a Series B round.
That funding increased Captain Fresh’s valuation to $200 million. The company had also raised $12 million last year in another round.
Read more: Indian AI Seafood Market Startup Captain Fresh Raises $40M
In the wake of these back-to-back funding rounds, Gowda told the ET his company’s “business quality” had improved significantly since the last quarter and that Captain Fresh had doubled its annualized revenue run rate for the year from December.
“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 last funding round, Captain Fresh has increased its B2B customers from 1,000 to 2,500 and expanded its product line to include food beyond seafood, such as red meat. Captain Fresh exports mainly to the U.S., Europe and western Asian countries, but says it wants to branch out to Africa and other markets in Asia.
“We have increased our addressable market significantly,” Gowda told the ET. “Last quarter we just had plans for the export market, now there are early signs that we can deliver … We continue to attract capital.”