Every night, thousands of fresh food wholesalers work through the early hours processing a flood of restaurant orders that arrive via text, email, and voicemail – a critical but chaotic process that determines next morning’s deliveries to restaurants across the world. Today, Fresho, the market-leading order management platform that helps fresh food wholesalers operate more efficiently and better service their restaurant customers, has announced the successful close of its $17M Series B funding round, bringing total investment to $50M to date.
The oversubscribed round welcomed both new and existing shareholders, led by Geoff Tarrant, Co-Founder and former Executive Chairman of Payapps, the global construction software firm acquired by Autodesk for $600M in 2024. Tarrant, who also served as director of ASX-listed Adbri, will join Fresho’s Board of Directors.
Founded in 2015 by James Andronis, drawing on 15 years’ experience running one of Australia’s leading seafood wholesalers, and Huw Birrell, a technology entrepreneur with international finance expertise, Fresho has revolutionized how fresh food wholesalers and their restaurant customers work together. The platform recently celebrated processing its 30 millionth order since 2016, with 10 million orders in the past year alone.
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“We are pleased to have closed this round in a challenging fundraising environment. This speaks to the size of the opportunity, and to our record of consistent growth and capital management to date,” said James Andronis, co-founder and CEO of Fresho. “Fresh food distribution has been traditionally slow to adopt technology, but a confluence of factors are causing this to change. These include margin pressures, skills shortages and questions of succession in family-owned firms. As a result, we are seeing unprecedented interest in how technology can drive efficient operations, better customer service, and improved work/life balance for owners and managers.”
Fresho’s platform has fundamentally transformed how fresh food moves from supplier to restaurant kitchen. The company’s technology directly addresses the industry’s unique challenges, where produce travels from farm or ocean to restaurant in days, prices fluctuate daily, and high-end restaurant customers demand perfection. By maintaining a closed marketplace model that protects and strengthens existing supplier-restaurant relationships, Fresho has earned the trust of leading wholesalers while digitizing their operations.
The impact is particularly visible in daily operations. Where suppliers once dedicated overnight staff to manually process orders arriving through emails, texts, and voicemails, Fresho’s AI-powered system now automatically converts incoming orders into structured data, while giving restaurants direct access to live pricing and availability through its app. This transformation has not only eliminated unsociable working hours but has dramatically improved order accuracy and processing speed.
SOURCE: GlobeNewswire