Contxto – Colombian e-commerce and agrotech startup, Frubana, is seeking to enter larger Latin American markets.

México y Brasil!

With a solid and strong foundation already established in its native country, Frubana is ready to launch abroad in hopes of capturing a larger share of the market. According to Dinero, the startup is already targeting Mexico and Brazil to grow operations.

Frubana is a startup eliminating intermediaries in the food supply chain. The self-proclaimed “farm-to-restaurant” platform generates better prices, discovery, and transparency. This helps generate trust between parties while improving logistics. Specifically, it makes buying and selling farm products easier between restaurants and small retailers.

Fabián Gómez Gutiérrez, former Leader of Expansion of Rappi, is now Frubana’s founder and CEO. “Technology allows us to scale, and scaling brings efficiency,” said Gómez. “Specifically, we have built predictive technology that facilitates routing, operations, and purchasing.”

Frubana, modern agro-solution

The agro-industry is extremely important across all of Latin America. Nonetheless, the way business is conducted in the industry leaves much to be desired. Many farmers spend most of their lives working under precarious conditions. Even more, they must withstand unfair competition and bargaining from customers in terms of both payback turnovers and prices.

Logistics and the overall process is still very manual and unstandardized. Therefore, it creates a lot of unnecessary intermediaries and costs between producers and final consumers.

“A farmer in Colombia sells a kilo of lemon for a thousand pesos and restaurants are buying that same kilo for three thousand pesos,” said Gutiérrez. “Frubana has identified this need and focuses on optimizing the supply chain to reduce costs for the buyer and pay a higher price to the producer.

According to Gutiérrez, the spread between the perceived price and the actual cost adds 10 to 20 percent to the final cost, all while involving four or five intermediaries.

The startup’s platform allows restaurants to share information with Frubana. To reduce costs and waste, the program indicates the exact amount of money needed to buy certain goods from agricultural producers. This helps prevent oversupplying in the process.

“The platform generates a record of the purchases made by customers, which helps them to know their real costs, projects in the future and identify consumer behavior, among others,” said Miguel Silva, Head of Product at Frubana.

The company with less than two years of operations has already participated in Silicon Valley’s prestigious accelerator, Y-Combinator. Nowadays, it has over 100 employees while showing an average monthly growth rate of 50 percent.

Currently serving over 1,000 customers, Frubana operates in Colombia and bills around US$6 million in sales. With that in mind, the company seems to be getting in good shape to expand to Mexico and Brazil.

To date, the company has raised a total of US$12 million in funding. Initially, its pre-seed round of US$2 million was led by Y Combinator, monashees, Kairos and GE32 Capital. Subsequently, the startup raised US$10 million in seed from its previous backer, Kairos, earlier this year.

-VC