Online retail startup Omnia Fishing Inc. has raised a $2.1 million round of venture capital led by Cambridge, Mass.-based Founder Collective and Omaha-based Dundee Venture Capital.
Other participants in the round include local investors Bread and Butter Ventures, Southeast Minnesota Capital Fund and angel investor Darren Cotter, as well as Sioux Falls Angels, GAN Ventures and former Bass Pro Shops CFO Ralph Castner.
Omnia sells fishing tackle to anglers based on the fish, lakes and conditions they're likely to encounter in their area. It's expanded throughout the country by partnering with local tackle brands that can provide localized information to customers.
Golden Valley-based Omnia Fishing saw 400% year-over-year growth in 2020, founder and CEO Matt Johnson said. That's in part because it has expanded the number of individual products it sells to over 9,000 products and ships to all 50 states. The store will grow to around 25,000 products soon, Johnson said. It's hoping for a year-over-year growth rate of 550% in 2021, he said. Omnia has nine employees and is looking to hire five more with the new cash.
The new round of fundraising wasn't planned but is a great vote of confidence from some serious investors, Johnson said. Founder Collective, for example, was an early investor in Uber.
While many institutional investors don't know much about fishing, they do know e-commerce. Fishing has been slow to adopt e-commerce, though it's a $50 billion industry. Johnson expects the opportunity presented by the products that it stocks is about a tenth of that, though potential partnerships with fishing brands.
Omnia raised $1.5 million in 2020 from a group that included Bread and Butter. It previously raised $1 million from Gopher Angels and other individual investors to get its site off the ground in 2018.
