Misfits Market, a startup that has created a buzz in the grocery business by selling so-called “ugly” fruits and vegetables at a discount price. The company announced on 21th April that it has raised $200 million in Series C funding.
Now, Misfits market’s total funding rose at $301.5 million and moved its valuation into unicorn territory (above $1 billion). Though the valuation is not confirmed; though Bloomberg reports that it’s $1.1 billion.
Founder and CEO Abhi Ramesh told Techcrunch that,
New Jersey-based startup has expanded beyond produce into a variety of grocery categories. At the same time, he said all of its products remain united by a focus on “a single word, which is value.”
Misfits Market products are discounted by up to 40% compared to what you’d find in other grocery stores (in-person or online), which Ramesh said the company achieves by purchasing products that regular stores won’t buy or sell, often for “crazy, random” reasons. For example, he said the company recently purchased 50,000 bottles of perfectly good olive oil “where the labeling was just angled the wrong way.”
The company says that over the year now it has active customers and their order volume grew 5x last year. Misfits has shipped around 77 million pounds of food to more than 400,000 customers.
Ramesh also said,
“Fortunately, because we operate our own fulfillment centers and we have our own internal tech built around this, we were not constrained by the same constraints that physical grocery stores have, where we have to close at 9 p.m. every day, where we have to make room for regular foot traffic and Instacart shoppers,” he said. “For us, we just have to scale our fulfillment centers, which is easier said than done.”
Misfits Market plans now making new strategies with their new funding and they are thinking to expand into new grocery categories and new geographies to attract more customers.