Captain Contemporary, an AI-powered seafood market startup in India, has raised $40 million in Collection B funding led by Tiger World and Prosus Ventures, the enterprise arm of Dutch web conglomerate Prosus.
Current buyers Accel India, Ankur Capital, Incubate Fund and Matrix Companions India additionally participated within the spherical. Nearly 75% of the most recent spherical got here from new buyers, says Utham Gowda, founder and CEO of Captain Contemporary. In July, Captain Contemporary raised $12 million in a Collection A spherical led by Accel India and Matrix Companions India.
The 2-year outdated startup will use the funds to “construct tech interventions and deeper tech integrations throughout the provision and demand-side community, similar to a real-time buying and selling market, pricing and high quality standardisation utilizing AI, in addition to the applying of robotic automation to maneuver large volumes with precision,” based on a press release.
Captain Contemporary makes use of digital expertise to streamline India’s fragmented $30 billion seafood business. It says its real-time B2B platform makes use of AI to assist retail companies match buyer orders with India’s fishermen and fish farms. Captain Contemporary’s predictive fashions assist supply provides of particular fish days earlier than prospects place orders, enabling in a single day supply to some cities. The startup was included on this 12 months’s Forbes Asia 100 to Watch listing.
“For hundreds of years, the fish and seafood business has stayed the identical with little or no innovation and now we have a novel alternative to revolutionise the sector utilising expertise,” Gowda stated within the press launch. Globally, fish and seafood demand is estimated to be $400 billion and represents one of many fastest-growing protein segments with an ever-expanding provide hole, based on the press launch.
Captain Contemporary, which says it serves 500,000 retailers and fishmongers together with 75 million client households, is dashing deliveries in a fishing sector that makes up about 6.3% of the worldwide fish manufacturing. The sector employs about 14.5 million individuals who fish and in fiscal 12 months 2018-2019 manufacturing grew by roughly 6% to 13.34 million tons, business analysts ResearchAndMarkets has found. However India’s fishing business faces “poor yield optimization” together with issues in harvest and post-harvest operations, the Indian tutorial web site GKToday says.