Licious, a direct-to-consumer fresh meat and seafood brand, has raised $52 million towards its Series G round led by IIFL’s Late Stage Tech Fund and Avendus.

First reported by ET, the funding round takes Licious to a post-money valuation of $1.05 billion, making its entry to the coveted unicorn club (companies having more than a billion dollars in valuation).

The startup plans to use the raised funds to grow its offline business and further its ready to eat product portfolio. Licious also plans to use the money for its geographic expansion.

Licious | Fresh Meat And Seafood Brand

Started by Vivek Gupta and Abhay Hanjura in 2015, Licious currently serves 14 Indian cities such as NCR, Chandigarh, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Jaipur, Coimbatore, Kochi, Puducherry, Vizag, Vijayawada and Kolkata.

Serving over 1 million orders every month with over 90% repeat consumption across markets, Licious has delivered to more than 2 million customers to date.

Speaking on the development, Abhay Hanjura, Co-founder of Licious,

“The fresh meats and seafood sector is still largely underserved and unorganised that holds a vast opportunity of $40 billion. We will continue to build the category through investments in technology for supply chain excellence, product innovation, talent, and vendor partner upgrades.”

As per Vivek, the startup is opportunistically looking at growing inorganically by acquiring smaller businesses in the ancillary segments and business areas.

Chetan Naik of IIFL AMC talked about the focus of Licious on product quality, freshness and innovation and stated that Licious is amongst the fastest-growing D2C brands and is one of the few consumer businesses in India with very strong revenue retention metrics.

With the pandemic playing a major role in accelerating growth for the D2C sector, the D2C market in India is at an inflection point and is expected to attain a size of more than 100 billion by 2025, stated the company.

Need legal assistance for your startup? Just contact us.

Follow us and connect with us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.