FreshToHome.com announces $11M Series A Funding led by CE Ventures

Bengaluru: India’s largest e-commerce company for fresh meat and fish delivery, FreshToHome.com, announces its 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 Add Advisory Partners of UAE was the advisor to the company on the round. The Series A deal concluded mid 2018.

Bengaluru based online store FreshToHome.com delivers fresh, chemical-free seafood and meat to your doorstep. Founded in the year 2015, FreshToHome.com is currently present in four cities – Bengaluru, NCR (Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, Faridabad, Ghaziabad & Greater Noida), Chennai and Kerala (Kochi, Trivandrum, Calicut & Trichur) with over 400,000 customers and growing. With the brand promise of 100% fresh, 0% 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-focused 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; UAE based global smart kitchen network, Kitopi, that cooks and delivers on behalf of restaurants; and India-based online furniture subscription platform, Furlenco. Other participants in the round included Das Capital of Japan, Al-Nasser Holdings & Abdul Azeez Al-Ghurair from 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 fisherman and farmers across India. FreshToHome also plans on expanding to new geographies such as Mumbai and Pune apart from its current operations in Bangalore, NCR, Kerala and Chennai.

According to Shan Kadavil, Founder & CEO of FreshToHome.com, “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 a 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. 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 1500 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 4 large processing factories to ensure traceability and food safety”

Speaking on the investment, Tushar Singhvi, Director, CE Ventures says, “The meat and seafood segment in India is pegged to be a 50 billion dollar market, but we have to keep in mind that it’s a highly fragmented industry. FreshToHome.com is not only trying to streamline the industry, but they’re also using technology to revolutionize the way the industry functions by disintermediating the supply chain, eliminating the middleman and working directly with the fishermen and farmers in a market place model, to make fresh and chemical free food accessible to the masses at large. It is a very robust model and a sustainable mission, and we are extremely proud to back Shan and his team on this journey.”