Fuel Ventures leads a £715k pre-seed round in FruPro
FruPro closes a large £715k pre-seed round, led by Fuel Ventures, to create there B2B digital marketplace for the fresh produce industry.
What is FruPro?
FruPro are planning to build the world's largest B2B digital marketplace for the Fresh Produce industry. The platform will streamline the end-to-end supply chain services to help companies to respond more quickly to market changes while boosting operational efficiency. Connecting businesses directly with their services and products will allow them to always optimise their position, further reduce costs and pass savings along to their customers. The FruPro platform will offer a full suite of solutions for the Fresh Produce industry and take the current offline processes online.
What are the issues with the fresh produce industry?
- Low transparency - 1/3 of all fruits and vegetables produced in Europe are wasted
- Poor financial management - 10% of £1 billion London non-retail sector revenue in the UK is lost to bad debt
- Manual process - highly reliant on paper work
- Lack of reach - 80% of the non-retail sector would like alternative options to sell to and new market opportunities
What is FruPro’s solution?
- Connect better
- Market & distribute better - Understand market trends, improve efficiency, reduce waste and increase redistribution
- Operate better - automate the day to day processes
- Trade better - Supply chain from end to end, in a compliant market place with transparent pricing, reducing risk and bad debt
Meet the team:
The founding team brings an array of experience. Will Hill, Co-Founder & CEO of FruPro, and his family worked in fresh produce for 5 generations and their firm W.T.Hill & Sons was founded over 130 years ago. He has worked within every step of the supply chain. Ollie Morley-Fletcher, COO, is an ex-Management Consultant, who worked in Business Transformation at Protiviti and Kov Murugaratnam is former Product Director in Advanced Analytics and AI Solutions at GSK and holds a PhD in Engineering from Oxford.
Will Hill said,
“Having worked with every step of the supply chain, I have lived and breathed the issues which FruPro will solve. The industry has suffered from low technological adoption and little automation and as a result the industry relies on manual processes and is not efficiently connected.
This results in a shocking amount of food waste, a third of all fresh produce grown in Europe is wasted while we have 4.7 million people in the UK who are severely food insecure. In the offline world knowing your customers is extremely difficult, and this leads to large amounts of debt and fraud within the market. My vision is to enhance every relationship with fresh produce ensuring the best product is reaching the end consumer in its optimum state by providing the digital ecosystem for the next 5 generations of the industry to flourish in.”
Check them out at https://frupro.com/
If you are an entrepreneur looking for investment, please apply here or email your deck at alexb@fuel.ventures or reach out to me on LinkedIn.