Matrix-backed Country Delight raises $25M

23rd November, 2020. New Delhi: Country Delight, India's largest direct-to-home food essentials brand has announced today that it has raised $25 million in its series C round of funding led by Elevation Capital (formerly SAIF partners) with participation from scheme(s) managed by IIFL AMC. The round also saw participation from existing investors Matrix Partners India as well as Orios Venture Partners.

Founded by Chakradhar Gade and Nitin Kaushal, Country Delight (CD) is a direct-to home consumer brand that delivers pure, fresh and minimally processed food essentials. CD offers high quality products in the affordable-premium category as daily subscriptions and delivers them through its proprietary distribution network. This has enabled CD to serve a large addressable market and build out a large and wide customer base over the last few years.

From launching in the market with milk as their sole product, CD has since then expanded into additional dairy products as well as staples - all under the umbrella brand of Country Delight.

With purity & freshness at the core of the brand's ideology, CD is a full-stack business and sources all their produce directly from farms within a 150-200 km radius. Their supply chain is a complete tech/IoT-enabled system which ensures a fully traceable source provenance and only the highest quality product. All deliveries are made within 24-36 hours from collection, keeping the brand ethos of purity & freshness intact.

The new round of funding will be used to develop and launch the broader set of food essentials such as fruits & vegetables, cold-pressed edible oils, wheat, batters, pulses, spices, pickles, and jams among others.

"We are a very customer-centric business with an obsession to develop products that truly delight our customers. Direct customer connect gives us a very strong feedback loop and helps us iterate towards near-perfect products. Tech plays a very big role in building quality traceability and supply chain at scale - all of this while staying very capital efficient. We want to give our customers the best quality products, at the lowest possible price & directly to their doorstep. We are very excited to build this out with our partners (Elevation Capital, IIFL AMC, Matrix Partners India & Orios Venture Partners)", said Chakradhar Gade, Co-founder, Country Delight.

"We have been thoroughly impressed by the evolution of the team's vision over time, bottoms-up thinking, customer obsession and focus on capital efficient growth. The company has a truly unique business model and is one of the few consumer businesses in India with phenomenal retention metrics. We are super excited to partner with them in this journey of creating India's most loved pure & fresh daily essentials brand", said Deepak Gaur, Partner, Elevation Capital

Prashasta Seth, Senior Managing Partner at IIFL AMC said, "Country Delight is a unique D2C brand with a strong customer proposition in terms of freshness, purity and minimally-processed product offering at an affordable premium price. Through the daily subscription model, owned distribution and use of technology for quality check, Country Delight has demonstrated superior offering and a strong customer connect in the Food Essentials space. We are happy to partner with Matrix Partners, Orios Ventures and Elevation Capital and back the highly pedigreed promoters of Country Delight '“ Chakradhar and Nitin.'

"Direct to Home consumer brands are disrupting the brands' landscape. By skipping retailers and distributors, they truly own customers and enjoy large margins. Country Delight is one of the finest examples of this, starting with dairy and expanding into a variety of daily edibles like bread, eggs, ghee and more shortly under their own farm fresh product line, they are building what promises to be a very important brand for households. We are delighted to be a part of this Series C, having led the Seed and A and participated in the B", said Rehan Yar Khan, Founder and Managing Partner, Orios Venture Partners

Avnish Bajaj, Founder and Managing Director, Matrix India, commented, "We are fortunate to have partnered with Chakri and Nitin early in their journey of building Country Delight and are excited about this milestone. The business has further expanded into fresh food, and the resilience of the full stack and digital-first business model was evident during the recent Covid disruption with an acceleration in the growth of the business. We welcome Elevation Capital and IIFL as new partners and look forward to the journey ahead!'

About Country Delight:
Country Delight (CD) is India's largest direct-to-home food essentials brand serving pure, fresh products to its consumers every day. The company has a full stack approach and serves nearly 1.5 lakh households across key cities in India. CD operates under a daily subscription model serving its customers fresh cow & buffalo milk , Ghar Jaisa Dahi, Desi Daanedar Ghee, Taaza Paneer, Fresh Breads & Eggs. Further information is available at: www.countrydelight.in

About Matrix Partners India:
Matrix Partners India is an investment firm with approximately $1 billion under management. Founded in 2006, the firm invests in companies targeting the Indian consumer and enterprise market at the seed, early and early growth stages. Matrix India has invested in several market leading consumer-focused companies such as, W For Woman (ready to wear fashion label), Chumbak (design led lifestyle brand), Mosaic Wellness (lifestyle & wellness consumer brand), OZiva (plant-based nutrition brand) &Me (F&B brand focused on women's health & wellness), DaMENSCH (premium men's apparel brand) The Whole Truth (a 100% clean label food brand), and Open Secret (F&B brand focused on the healthy snack market).
Other marquee investments include Ola (local transportation), Practo (digital health platform), Dailyhunt (mobile local language platform), Treebo (digital hotel chain), Mswipe (mobile POS), Five Star Business Finance (SME lending), OfBusiness (credit led B2B marketplace), Ola Electric (multimodal electric vehicle platform), Razorpay (payments), Stanza Living (tech enabled student housing platform), Vogo (scooter sharing), and Cloudnine Hospitals (leading chain of maternity hospitals), among others. Matrix India has advisory offices in Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai. Matrix Partners has a global network of funds investing in the US, China and India, with approximately $5 billion under management. Further information is available at www.matrixpartners.in. To know more about our investment philosophy & ideologies, check out the #MatrixMoments podcast series.