Exclusive: Meat ordering startup Licious raises Series A funding

Meat and fish ordering startup Licious, run by Delightful Gourmet Pvt. Ltd, has raised its Series A round of funding, co-founders Abhay Hanjura and Vivek Gupta have told Techcircle.in.

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The Series A round comes almost seven months after the ten month-old startup raised its angel round of funding from TV Mohandas Pai and Kanwaljit Singh.

Founded in June 2015, the Bangalore-based startup had raised $1 million in angel funding in September last year. Pai is a former Infosys board member while Singh is a co-founder of Helion Ventures and currently runs his own seed investment firm, Fireside Ventures.

The number of orders has grown from 1000 in the first month to 15,000 in six months, Gupta said. The company covers entire Bangalore city through 11 centres from where the meat and fish are delivered to customers. The company aims to achieve 50,000 orders a month in the city before expanding to other cities, said Hanjura.

"We are expanding categories. We target to reach 100,000 orders in a city," said Hanjura. The company plans to expand to 11 cities in the next three years.

Hanjura is a former insurance industry professional while Gupta was earlier a finance controller at Helion Venture Partners.

With 150 employees, Licious runs an end-to-end business model comprising procurement, processing, storage and delivery. The firm claims to deliver within 90 minutes of ordering on its site. Licious is a pioneer among food-tech startups focusing exclusively on meat ordering and delivery. Following Licious' angel funding in September last year, Gurgaon-based Zappfresh raised $300,000 in angel investment.

Meanwhile, a number of grocery e-tailers and hyperlocal startups are focusing on meat and seafood delivery as a category. Online grocer BigBasket supplies meat and seafood. Also, hyperlocal startup LazyLads, which is in the middle of Series A  fund raising, has meat and seafood delivery as one of its six categories.