Rooser has secured more than £17m in funding to help scale up its technology designed to speed up fish sales and cut waste.
The Edinburgh-headquartered 'fishtech' company was backed by Index Ventures, Google Ventures and Point Nine Capital.
The online platform for fish traders works with a processing team in the fishing port of Boulogne-Sur-Mer in Northern France.
Rooser was founded in 2019 by chief executive Joel Watt, a serial seafood entrepreneur. Its chief commercial officer is Nicolas Desormeaux, a seasoned commercial fish buyer and seller, with 18 years’ of experience.
The start-up recently appointed chief operating officer Erez Mathan, formerly chief operating officer and chief revenue officer at GoCardless, who helped scale the fintech firm from 20 to 700 employees and $100m in annualised revenue.
It has also appointed chief technology officer Thomas Quiroga, founder of the digital agency beyondr.
Rooser, which is currently trading fish across 13 different countries, performs quality checks for both buyers and sellers – allowing for greater accountability, higher quality produce and faster payments.
More than €140bn worth of fish is traded within Europe every year, with 35,000 different types of items changing hands between a patchwork of around 140,000 businesses.
The market is split between multiple fisheries, which harvest the fish: primary processors, who fillet, slice, prepare and package it; wholesalers, which distribute the fish; and end users, such as restaurants, supermarkets and fishmongers.
The company claims that for every two fish that makes it to a plate, one goes to waste, so it is focusing on building its marketplace and stock management software for primary processors.
Rooser is also working on improved quality controls, supply chain financing and personalised features for buyers and sellers. It is planning to eventually use the data on its platform to generate meaningful insights, models and reports for users.
The company currently employs 27 people.
Watt explained: “The seafood industry is like this giant machine, with all these gears turning all the time at breakneck speed; I saw the chaos for myself.
“Rooser was what we hacked together to solve the problem for our factory, and we realised the opportunity when other processors started wanting the software for themselves – in the long run, what we’re building should help us to understand and manage global fish stocks more responsibly, to see where our seafood comes from and to ensure the best-quality produce ends up on our plates.”
Georgia Stevenson, a partner at Index Ventures, said: “The seafood market is huge, but it’s fragmented and mostly offline.
“Rooser promises to make the whole experience simpler and more efficient for everyone in the value chain – improving margins, reducing waste, giving buyers greater choice and sellers a bigger market.”
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