WayCool Foods raises Rs120 cr funding; now handling over 150 tons of food produce daily

Chennai based Agri-tech start-up WayCool has raised Rs.120 cr, as a combination of equity and debt from LGT Impact, prominent angels, and institutional lenders, including Northern Arc Capital and Caspian.

WayCool Foods, founded in July 2015 by Karthik Jayaraman and Sanjay Dasari, is India's fastest growing food distribution platform leveraging innovative technology to scale-up and operate a complex supply chain. The company operates a full-stack, broad-line product range across multiple channels and categories like fresh produce, staples and dairy serving over 4,000 clients.

WayCool Foods aims to use the funds to further scale-up operations across Southern and Western India, bolster its technology platform and reinforce its supply chain by building or acquiring assets and capabilities in sourcing, value added products, and automation of distribution lines.

Veda Corporate Advisors acted as the exclusive financial advisor to WayCool for the fundraise.

Commenting on the fundraise, Sanjay Dasari, Co-Founder, said, "Along with rapid growth, we have always been committed to profitability, and almost all of our business lines are operationally profitable. We had committed to open and operate 3 locations after our last institutional fund raise - we are currently operating in 13 locations. WayCool takes pride in the fact that over 70% of our tonnage is sourced directly from farmers and farming partners, with 100% of payments made digitally in 3-5 days, substantially enhancing the farmer's return on capital employed. We are also proud to have increased farmer income by about 20% on average. In addition, we have an incredible amount of data on consumer buying behavior across segments and geographies, and plan to further strengthen our technology platform to enhance supply chain efficiencies."

Karthik Jayaraman, Co-Founder and CEO of WayCool Foods, added "We are committed to solving India's food supply chain problems while making a substantial positive difference to the farmers and consumers. We aim to build a large food distribution business by leveraging cutting edge technology to create efficiencies and reduce information asymmetry in the supply chain, with high quality phy-gital assets. As we continue scaling across product segments, geographies, and business lines, we will continue to raise funds but at the same time remain capital efficient and achieve a quality, mature business at scale by carefully calibrating the stage of the business to the funding needs."

Kartik Srivatsa, Managing Partner at Aspada, an earlier investor in WayCool, said "What impresses us most about WayCool is their execution capability. They have been able to scale rapidly and consistently by leveraging technology to build a high-quality supply chain despite market disturbances. The Company has scaled 20x since the last round of funding with judicious use of capital.