Exclusive: Kamath brothers-backed fund, Aman Gupta and others invest in Licious

Direct-to-consumer meat and seafood brand Licious has raised fresh funds from a clutch of investors including Nithin and Nikhil Kamath-backed Gruhas Proptech LLP, Aman Gupta, co-founder of consumer electronics brand boAt and Haresh Chawla, partner at private equity firm True North.

Licious has issued 87 Series F1A  preference shares at an issue price of Rs 10,50,738.62 each to Haresh Chawla,, Aman Gupta, Sameer Mehta, Narshing Das Makkar and Ashish Aggarwal, the company’s regulatory filings show.

Kamath brothers-backed Gruhas Proptech LLP has led the round with investment of Rs 3.47 crore followed by Chawla who invested Rs 2 crore. Gupta, Mehta and Makkar have invested Rs 1.05 crore each while the remaining capital was invested by Agarwal.

The Bengaluru-based company became India’s first unicorn from the D2C segment following a $52 million round led by IIFL AMC’s Late Stage Tech Fund in October. During the same year, it also scooped up $192 million in Series F round. 

As per Fintrackr’s estimates the company has been valued at Rs 9,890 crore or $1.32 billion post-money after having raised around $340 million to date.

Licious, which is available in 14 Indian cities, claimed to have achieved a growth of 500% in the last year and delivered to more than 2 million unique customers so far. It has built a farm-to-fork model including handling the entire back-end supply chain. 

In 2020, the company had also forayed into the ready-to-eat segment. 

Licious has emerged as the largest player in this space and competes with the likes of FreshToHome, Zapfresh, BBDaily, MeatRoot and Easymeat.

For the fiscal year ending on March 31, 2021, the Temasek-backed company saw its revenue from operations swell up 3.2X to Rs 420.3 crore from Rs 131.8 crore in FY20. 

As per Fintrackr’s analysis, sales of meat, seafood, marinates and eggs accounted for 97.2% of the revenue during the fiscal year while delivery and other related services made up the rest. The companies losses grew by 153% to Rs 370 crore in FY21, however, its EBITDA margins improved vastly from -95.12% in FY20 to -43.31% during FY21.