Bengaluru-based online meat brand Licious raises $10 mn in fresh funding

Firm currently processes 50,000 orders a month in Bengaluru alone, with a base of 30,000 users

Bengaluru-based online meat brand Licious has raised $10 million in fresh funding led by Mayfield India as it looks to expand its service outside of its home market starting with Hyderabad and Delhi-NCR.

The round also saw participation from Mohandas Pai's 3one4 Capital, Sistema Asia Fund and Neoplux Technology Fund. Licious will use the capital to grow its technology apart from enabling the company to setup meat processing facilities and supply chain at all its new locations.

"The money we've raised now will primarily go into expansion in new cities and building better technology in the back end which includes state of the art meat processing facilities. While this isn't a very capital intensive business, it's a very infrastructure dependent business," said Vivek Gupta, founder at Licious.

Licious says it already makes money on every order, but isn't profitable at a company level due to investments it continues to make into the business. With another $10 million in the bank, Gupta says the company will now focus on growth into 2-3 new markets over the next two years.

Currently, Licious processes 50,000 orders in a month in Bengaluru alone with a base of around 30,000 users. The company entered the Hyderabad market earlier this month says it is already processing around 100 orders a day, but expects that to grow significantly in the next few months.

Licious is aiming to enter Delhi-NCR within the next six months, setting up a meat processing plant locally.

"We are a very financially sound company so we don't need to blow a lot of money to achieve profitability and growth. This $10 million will help us grow between 7-10 times our current size over the next two years and we want to become profitable within this capital," added Gupta.

With end-to-end meat processing and sales, the firm is also looking at diversifying its product offering to customers. So far it has an assortment of 90 products, including products such as pickles and meat spreads apart from fresh cut meat.

Working in a highly unorganised sector, Licious says its focus on quality and hygiene has won it customers, with a repeat purchase rate of nearly 80 per cent. Further, with over 300 million Internet users in the country, the company doesn't see itself partnering with offline retailers to stock its products anytime soon.

So far Licious has raised a total of $13.5 million across three rounds (angel and two institutional rounds) with founders Vivek Gupta and Abhay Hanjura hoping they don't have to raise any more money to grow their company.