Celcius Logistics Solutions Pvt Ltd, which operates the cold chain start-up Celcius said Thursday it has raised $4.5 million (around Rs 34 crore) in a bridge funding round led by Mumbai Angels.
Celcius said that this round is part of the Series A funding that the brand is aiming to close for $10 million (approximately Rs 76 crore) in the coming months.
Other investors who took part in this funding round include Supply Chain Labs, Endurance Capital, VCats, Keiretsu Forum, Huddle, among others.
The Mumbai-based start-up plans to deploy the fresh capital to expand geographically to over 500 cities this year. It will also allocate some funds towards growing its tech, sales and operations team and working on development programmes to aid small-scale and regional transporters across the country.
"The newly acquired funds will allow us to stay on the momentum of scaling up our operations across the country. We plan on expanding our reach to over 500 cities, and to support the country by transporting COVID-19 vaccines and other essential perishables to remote locations,” said Swarup Bose, founder & CEO, Celcius.
Founded in 2020, Celcius claims to be the only cold chain aggregator platform in India’s cold-chain marketplace. It provides end-to-end cold chain solutions and targets markets such as dairy, pharma, fresh agriculture produce, fruit export, seafood and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. Its software-as-a-service (SaaS) based platform enables various cold chain entities to collaborate.
Having recently launched the ‘Vahan Vikas Samriddhi Programme,’ through which Celcius aims at financially supporting regional transport entrepreneurs and encouraging them to venture into the cold chain segment, Bose says the funds will help the company further this initiative.
In August 2021, Celcius raised $500,000 in a seed fund round from Mumbai Angels Network, along with Huddle, Lumis Partners, venture capital and private equity firms MaGEHold, Keiretsu Forum, Eaglewings Ventures Alliance Network (EVAN), and investors from Malaysia, Nigeria, and the US.
According to the Celcius’ statement, it has, so far, has onboarded 2,500 vehicles, 107 Cold storages and increased operations in over 150 cities. It has also tied up with finance institutions like Shriram Transport and Finance Company and with original equipment manufacturers (OEM) like Ashok Leyland and Tata Motors.
