Freshboxx, Fresh Fruits & Vegetables E-tailer, Raises Angel Funding

Karanataka-based fresh fruits and vegetables e-tailer, Freshboxx, has secured an undisclosed amount of angel funding from Ravi Linganuri, entrepreneur and angel investor. These funds will be used to hire a core team, upgrading their technology, improving infrastructure and expanding within the state. The company is also looking to multiply its revenue to Rs. 1 crore per month and expanding its customer base by 3x in the next three months.

Launched in December 2015, Freshboxx was started by Rohan Kulkarni and incubated at Sandbox Startups, which is a unit of the Deshpande Foundation. The company claims to be the first ecommerce fruit & vegetable platform working out of Hubli.

“Other players in this segment are working on a hyper local delivery format—they try to deliver the product at the quickest possible time getting it from different retail players. We focus on the quality of the products and services offered to customers, rather than turning ourselves into express delivery providers,” founder of Freshboxx, Rohan Kulkarni Inc42.

Currently, the company has a network of more than 1,000 farmers having more than 12,000 acres of land bank. These farmers are predominantly progressive farmers, which means that as and when Freshboxx expands, the farmer network will be handy to cater its needs.

Freshboxx also provides data feeds to these farmers about which crop to be grown and when to grow it as well, giving farmers the optimal price from the market. It works with farm produce organisations and NGOs to form an effective supply-chain process that also increases the income and productivity of the farmers. The company currently receives over 500 orders a week and is growing at a 40% M-o-M. Majority of the orders come from the B2B segment through partnerships with restaurants, messes, grocery retailers and others. It has over 500 products in the fruits & vegetables segment and plans to enter the household specialty supplies, as well as special international foods, bakery goods, and pastry desserts in its portfolio.

We are a lean-inventory based business model company that takes orders one day prior to delivering our fruits & vegetables on the next day. In addition, we are also planning to launch a premium, 59 minute-delivery service in October,” Rohan added.