Captain Fresh, a tech-based business to business seafood market, has raised $12 million in a Series A fundraising round headed by Accel. Ankur Capital and Incubate Fund were the others in the funding pond as well.

According to Captain Fresh’s Founder and CEO, Utham Gowda, the funds will be used to scale up its supply-side technology, extend distribution globally, and expand the company's crew on the deck.

Excluding Ankur Capital and Incubate Fund, others such as Matrix Partners India, joined the funding pond, including investors namely Jitendra Gupta (Jupiter), Asish Mohapatra, and Ruchi Kalra (OfBusiness), Souvik Sengupta (Infra.Market), Rajesh Yabaji (BlackBuck), Revant Bhate (Mosaic Wellness), Ramakanth Sharma (Livspace), and Amr (PayU).

The creation of Captain Fresh took place in 2019 and it proclaimed to be attempting to fish out the country’s fish and seafood supply chain. It promises to cast the net over predictability for merchants across many shores by mingling a digital commerce platform with a physical fulfilment layer.

Captain Fresh professes it works with more than 600 enterprises in more than ten Indian cities, spanning various retail formats.

“We have iterated the blueprint for efficiently aggregating demand and supply over the last 24 months, verified by a 10x growth spurt through the pandemic", Gowda added.

He explained that Captain Fresh’s goal is to redesign the advanced fish and seafood supply chain. It is said to be one of humanity's oldest trades, yet it has a lot of unanswered questions.

Captain Recent aims to address this by combining a digital commerce platform with a physical fulfilment layer to ensure that retailers enjoy honest, efficient, and transparent purchase experiences across a variety of codecs.

Captain Fresh swims through the depths of technologies to reduce the high levels of friction in the traditional fish and seafood trade, maximizing the value accrued to the provisioning communities. It has fished out the best-in-class procurement technology and a seafood-focused supply chain that exports over 20,000 kgs of fresh seafood each day from more than 30 different coasts.

“Captain Fresh intends to transform the $400 billion global fresh fish and seafood sector by building a tech-enabled B2B supply chain that can deliver superior quality at competitive costs with an emphasis on waste reduction", said Sudipto Sannigrahi, Vice President, Matrix India. We believe that, as a result of its tech-driven sourcing and supply chain capabilities, the company is well positioned to scale successfully across local and foreign markets in the coming year".

“We are very thrilled to see the tremendous growth that Captain Fresh has made since our original investment,” Krishnan Neelakantan, Associate, Ankur Capital, said. Fresh fish and seafood have a large market possibility. We are pleased about the journey ahead for Captain Fresh as it sets out to establish a pioneering commerce platform in this market, with a stronger staff and important pieces of tech being fished out.”

“The fresh fish and seafood sector in India is characterized by a large supply-demand imbalance, different quality standards, fragmented channels, and various other issues,” said Barath Shankar Subramanian, Associate at Accel. Captain Fresh is focusing on this fragmented supply base, aggregating it through technology, standardizing quality through size and technology, and serving retailers by providing better quality items, a greater fill rate, and predictable delivery”.

"We are delighted to be at this unusual junction of a mostly unsolved problem, a highly capital-efficient company strategy, and a strong investor group. Accel joins Matrix, Ankur, Incubate, ADB Ventures, and other top-tier investors on our cap-table", added Gowda.