Wonky veg delivery service Oddbox has smashed a multimillion-pound crowdfunding target to help step up its fight against food waste in the UK.
The business has so far raised more than £5.3m from almost 2,000 investors, beating its £4.7m goal within hours of the campaign going live on the Seedrs platform this week.
Oddbox founders Emilie Vanpoperinghe and Deepak Ravindran started the company in 2016 after learning that up to 40% of food grown in the UK goes to waste. It has since rescued in excess of 35,000 tonnes of surplus food and delivered about six-million fruit and veg boxes.
Revenues have grown rapidly from just £3.4m in 2019 to more than £30m in 2021, with the business building a subscriber base for its DTC model of about 75,000 customers.
The money from the convertible crowd round – which will see investor backing convert to equity during a future bigger fundraising – will be used to ramp up the Oddbox proposition to rescue bigger quantities of food.
Oddbox also plans to upgrade its tech processes to offer a more personalised box and broaden the offering into new channels and markets.
“Our aim is to save 90,000 tonnes of food from waste over the next five years and this round is significant in helping us achieve that,” said co-founder and CEO Emilie Vanpoperinghe.
“It will also help us reach more people with a broader range of products to suit each person’s lifestyle.”
Oddbox works directly with growers to rescue odd-shaped and surplus produce at risk of going to waste, delivering boxes of farm-fresh fruit and veg to direct to customers.
It previously raised more than £500k in a crowd round in 2018.
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