FreshToHome latest startup in cold chain delivery market

An innovative approach to supply chains can itself form the basis for a successful company, as Indian e-commerce startup FreshToHome is finding.

The company raised $20mn from a Series B funding round led by Indian venture capital fund Iron Pillar. The latest round comes just three months after the last, which saw the company raise $11mn in a Series A Funding Round led by CE Ventures.

FreshToHome’s USP is that it delivers fresh food, such as fish and meat, acquired directly from local producers, cutting out the middle-man for what it says is reduced costs and improved quality.

As reported by TechCrunch, FreshToHome has at least 400,000 customers spread across Bengaluru, the National Capital Region, Chennai and Kerala, interfacing with 1,500 Indian fishermen.

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CEO Shan Kadavil told TechCrunch at the time of its last round that FreshToHome wants to “Uber-ize farmers and fishmen in India. We are giving them an app — around which we have a US patent — for commodity exchange. What farmers and fishermen do is they bid with us (as mandated by local laws) electronically using the app.”

The firm is far from alone in recognising the potential of this business model in the Indian market, with competitors such as online supermarket bigbasket. Also specialising in the cold chain, fresh food side of the market is Licious and ZappFresh.

As reported by pymnts.com, Anand Prasanna, managing partner of investor Iron Pillar, said: “FreshToHome’s brand proposition has been to provide 100 percent fresh food with 0 percent chemicals — not an easy thing to achieve in India at a large scale. By smartly using big data and machine learning, they have created a sustainable supply chain, which offers a fair price to consumers, fishermen and farmers, for their premium produce.”