Foraged – the marketplace for wild and speciality foods – has announced that it has raised $2.7 million in its latest seed funding round.
The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Yelp co-founder and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, StubHub co-founder and Eric Baker, Shopify president Harley Finkelstein, and Fiverr founder and CEO Micha Koffman.
Foraged says it will use the capital to “enhance its suite of tools and features to deliver a more seamless and robust platform for buyers and sellers alike in the online marketplace”.
Launched in the US in 2021, Foraged was created to empower small-scale food producers – such as farmers and foragers – to grow sustainable businesses while nourishing people with easy access to naturally occurring foods.
Jack Hamrick, co-founder and CEO of Foraged, said: “Mainstream awareness of wild foods has been quietly, but intensely growing over the past few years. More people than ever have discovered that there are alternatives to the local supermarket. This funding not only validates the potential of our platform but also moves us closer to realising our vision for the food system of the future – where consumers can discover and connect with independent food producers in a more meaningful way.”
Foraged enables small-scale food producers to access an end-to-end, turnkey solutions for their business, handling “everything from shipping (especially for perishable goods) to secure payment processing via Stripe to a mobile app for messaging customers, uploading photos of products and managing local pickups”.
The company says that vendors are now able to seamlessly enter the ecommerce market where they can “instantly” get discovered by tens of thousands of new customers from all over the country – in turn allowing consumers to access rare foods never before available online.
Jeremy Levine, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, said: “Bessemer is excited to lead this financing round. We believe in Foraged’s mission to empower independent food producers and provide consumers with a unique shopping experience. Foraged has reimagined the way consumers think about where and how they get their food.”
By Phoebe Fraser
Source: foodbev.com
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