seafood trading platform
The fishing market globally was worth $253 billion in 2021, and despite the controversy that swirls around the industry, that figure continues to grow. Today a startup that has built a platform to make the business of fishing more efficient — and thus the process overall more traceable and less prone to waste — is announcing a round of funding to ride on that wave. Rooser, which provides a marketplace for sourcing fish aimed both at those fishing and those buying for wholesale, trade, or retail, has raised $23 million — funding that it will be using both to expand into more markets and to continue building more functionality into its platform.
Today the company’s focus is on stock management, providing tools to help suppliers manage this, as well as to handle and track sales and assess the wider marketplace for their products. Soon, the plan will be to incorporate more quality control tools, supply chain finance, and personalization for buyers and sellers to connect more likely trades; and further down the line, the startup will also bring more business intelligence and analytics into the mix for its customers.
Index Ventures is leading this round, with participation also from GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Point Nine Capital, as well as Figma CEO and co-founder Dylan Field, and David Nothacker, co-founder and CEO of freight and cargo startup Sennder,
The crux of the problem that Rooser is aiming to fix is that fishing is a huge and growing industry, but it’s been built on the back of major inefficiencies — inefficiencies that have time and again proven to be disastrous for more than just businesses, but for wider economic and ecological ecosystems.
Joel Watt — the CEO who co-founded the company with chief commercial officer Nicolas Desormeaux, COO Erez Mathan, and CTO Thomas Quiroga — saw this situation firsthand when he was running his own fishing business.
Originally an accountant by training, Watt hails from the north of Scotland (with an accent my American ear sometimes found hard to penetrate to match), and after years working for a big firm, he returned to his roots and hometown to start a fishing business — not a tech-based marketplace and budding big-data analytics play, but an actual, wet-floors, cold-rooms, and yellow boots fishing operation following in his family’s footsteps, with both his father and grandfather having also worked in fishing.
seafood trading platform
