Despite the controversy that swirls around the industry, the fishing market was worth $253 billion in 2021. A startup that built a platform to make the business of fishing more efficient and less prone to waste is announcing a round of funding. The funding will be used to expand into more markets, and to continue building moreFunctionality into its platform.
The company focuses on stock management, providing tools to help suppliers manage this, as well as to handle and track sales and assess the wider marketplace for their products. The plan is to incorporate more quality control tools, supply chain finance, personalization for buyers and sellers to connect more likely trades, and further down the line, the startup will also bring more business intelligence and analytics into the mix for its customers.
Figma CEO and co-founder Dylan Field and Sennder CEO David Nothacker are two of the people who are involved in this round.
Fishing is a huge and growing industry, but it has been built on the back of major inefficiencies that have time and again proven to be disastrous for more than just businesses.
When he was running his own fishing business, the CEO who co-founded the company saw this situation.
Watt is originally from the north of Scotland, and after years working for a big firm, he returned to his hometown to start a fishing business.
He scaled that business to 50 people and 10 million dollars in turnover in 10 years, and it was then that he began to see how inefficient it was. He said uncertainty was the greatest problem of the fishing business.
You have the boats and fisheries, those who turn the products into things you can eat, wholesalers and distributors, and then restaurants and fishmongers. He said that all of those need one-to-one communication, but there are many actors and price points. The market is large, but typically those working without leaning on any platform to access wider customer bases can only handle 20 contracts at a time, no matter how much fish they have to sell.
It's an issue on the subject of fish to sell. There are 250 types of fish typically sold in the fishing trade, but when you add in the range of sizes and other variables, it comes out to what Watt said was 35,000 SKUs, and there is little consistency in pricing across that landscape.
Add to that the many layers of people in the chain, and stages that they each manage, and the delays that bring into what is a highly perishable product, and you have a messy situation. Only one seafood item gets eaten for every two pulled out from the water.
Watt started to look into software that could help manage the business aspects of his operation after he pivoted into building and running a fishing business. The Doric dialect used in Watt's region of Scotland refers to a watering can.
Watt said that a team member in his fishing business made a comment about how they seemed to always be fighting a fire. The software is helping to fight the fires. The Sea.Store software was effective and people started asking to use it.
Watt said that Iceland is the biggest source of seafood on the platform. France accounts for 95 percent of all sales.
France is a big market for seafood. He said that boosting it as the main buyer was intentional.
He said that they wanted to get fit in one market and then develop a supply side.
Georgia Stevenson, the Index partner who led the investment, said that part of the interest for Index here was how successful Rooser has been in addressing this particular vertical's needs and building a marketplace to match that.
She said that it is enabling less waste, but it is also empowering seafood traders to do their jobs better. Stevenson said she believed that the fishing industry had addressed both of the issues lambasted by critics.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
