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Rohit Raj
Respect • 27d
How do you turn fish waste into a ₹3,421 crore business? Ask Utham Gowda , the founder of Captain Fresh , who turned India’s most fragmented, offline supply chain into one of the few profitable unicorn stories of 2025. Captain Fresh didn’t start in a coastal village it started in a boardroom. As an investment banker studying the seafood sector in 2015, Utham saw a gap most ignored: fishermen were losing money not because of demand, but because mixed catches didn’t meet size and quality preferences of large buyers. No fishing background. No family legacy. Just curiosity. By 2019, he quit his banking job and launched Captain Fresh to fix this inefficiency. Here’s how it works: -> Buys entire catches directly from fishermen (no waste, no haggling). -> Uses AI to sort by size, grade, and quality, matching orders in real‑time. -> Exports premium seafood to the U.S. & Europe (70% revenue). -> Sells medium‑grade to Tier‑1 cities and the rest to Tier‑2 buyers. Result? Spoilage dropped from 20–30% to 2–5%. Touchpoints cut from 30 to 5. And fishermen finally get paid fairly and fast. Fast forward to FY25: ₹3,421 crore in revenue. 145% growth. Profit after tax: ₹42 crore (from a ₹229 crore loss last year). 100 tons/day processed across 50+ centers. Now expanding across Southeast Asia and Africa with profitability after just five years. From banker to builder, Utham turned a supply‑chain inefficiency into a $3B business powered by empathy, process, and data. The formula every New‑Gen builder needs to remember: Spot the invisible problem → Engineer the fix → Scale quietly → Let numbers tell the story. Follow for more:- ~Rohit Raj,
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