“We consider the entire team marketers in each experience. The first value of our culture is being dreamy-eyed, but the 2d pillar is excellence. So it’s now not just about dreaming up the idea however executing it with excellence.”
For contemporary unicorn Licious’ cofounder and CEO Vivek Gupta, this mindset has driven the startup in creating an entirely new supply chain for meat and seafood products, changing the narrative on this enterprise round satisfactory, and additionally developing first-class jobs within the meat enterprise. “More than the unicorn reputation and something, every person are just feeling so satisfied that this enterprise has were given its lengthy-due percentage of recognition from consumers and traders,” he delivered
The Bengaluru-based totally meat delivery startup have become India’s 69th unicorn and 28th this year with its $52 Mn Series G spherical led by means of IIFL AMC’s Late Stage Tech Fund, Avendus FLF (Future Leaders Fund) and different personal fairness investors introduced earlier nowadays (October 05). The round comes on the heels of the startup elevating $192 Mn in its Series F spherical led with the aid of Singapore-based Temasek and others in advance this year. To date, Licious has raised more than $250 Mn in funding.
Licious Eyes Branded Offline Experience
Armed with the extra capital, the business enterprise is now trying to increase to retail sales with organisation-owned Licious-branded stores. These will begin appearing in December this 12 months, Gupta advised cft.
“D2C and on-line will always be our robust in shape. It can be powered by our offline revel in. That’s how we are envisioning it proper now,” added the CEO.
It’s probably that the company will attention on the equipped-to-devour and geared up-to-cook class for the retail shops, as that is also a large recognition vicinity for Licious in the subsequent 12-24 months, besides entering new cities. While the company has built a emblem and network inside the metros and Tier 1 cities, the following stop might be Tier 2 and three towns, wherein the trouble of meat shipping is yet to be addressed through devoted players.
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Founded in 2015 by means of Abhay Hanjura and Vivek Gupta, Licious is built on a farm-to-fork version, and the business enterprise owns the complete deliver chain from butchers to transport marketers. It operates on a hub and spokes version, wherein meat is sourced from farmers and processed at the processing centres, that's the hub and the spokes are the transport centres in diverse cities.
This also includes the cold chain, which is essentially for exceptional control thru procurement, processing and storage till the time the products attain customers.
As it expands to smaller towns and cities, Licious will financial institution on its network of processing centres to cater to greater postal codes. Gupta brought that currently Licious is a community of six processing centres that meet the demand of 12-14 towns each. The delivery to clients is managed thru one hundred twenty transport centres.
Ecommerce, D2C Competition Grows
The D2C meat class, a $40 Bn quarter globally, is still extensively untapped in India. But patron attitudes toward on line meat buying have changed considerably due to the fact February 2020.
While Licious has a huge market base within the meat section, main companies inside the shipping of meat and meat products include — BigBasket, JioMart, FreshtoHome, ZappFresh, Amazon India, Flipkart, Swiggy and other on line delivery platforms. Most of those connect meat stores to clients, while Licious, FreshtoHome, Zappfresh have appeared to create a deliver chain for a farm-to-fork meat delivery version.
So what exactly is the aggressive facet that Licious will bank on going forward as increasingly players input the marketplace? “If you inquire from me, it’s the supply chain. It’s one of the most precise supply chains which we recognise of and it is unrivaled in India. I can say that no one has finished it. And this is without delay related to our boom as a emblem and enterprise.”
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Managing and growing a modern-day supply chain has helped create repeat enterprise, he claimed, due to the fact the satisfactory of product is more or less constant and this is what meat purchasers want. “90% of our revenue comes from repeat customers.”
Currently, Licious claims to have an annual sales fee of INR 1,000 Cr and says it has a yr-on-year growth of 500%. The company claims to have over 2 Mn specific customers.
IPO On The Cards?
With this round, Licious has got home traders such as IIFL and Avendus on its captable, after bagging a number of foreign backers in preceding rounds. The profile of the brand new buyers is interesting, since it increases the possibility of an IPO for Licious in the near destiny.
IIFL AMC’s overdue-stage fund changed into launched in advance this yr, with pre-IPO rounds for tech corporations being one in all its middle attention areas. The different new investor, Avendus FLF, has also invested in Lenskart, Delhivery and Dailyhunt, so Licious is the fourth unicorn in its portfolio. Among that institution of startups, Delhivery is close to an IPO. So is Licious also chasing an IPO in the close to future?
Gupta answered, “IPO is honestly a part of the plan, however no longer inside the brief time period. It’s as a minimum -three years away. Abhay and I are really excited that Indian buyers are coming out of the shell and backing Indian tech. And these traders [IIFL, Avendus] are in it for the lengthy haul. So we're in no hurry.”
