Foraged, a D.C. online marketplace for wild and specialty foods from morel mushrooms to bear grease to bulk chaga chunks, has raised $2.7 million in seed funding to further develop its mobile app and expand into specialty meats and seafood sales on its platform.
Foraged offers a marketplace for hard-to-find specialty foods like wild mushrooms, truffles, unique types of berries and heirloom nuts. “Basically, if it's not at a farmers market and it's not at Whole Foods or a specialty grocer, it's on Foraged,” said co-founder and CEO Jack Hamrick.
Some big names have come on board with this new seed round, the company's largest to date. It was led by New York venture behemoth Bessemer Venture Partners, whose 200-some investments have included the likes of Pinterest, Twilio, Twitch and LinkedIn. Joining the firm in Foraged's round were founders from some of its own portfolio companies, including Yelp Inc. (NYSE: YELP) co-founder and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, StubHub co-founder Eric Baker, Shopify (NYSE: SHOP) President Harley Finkelstein and Fiverr founder and CEO Micha Koffman. This new injection brings Foraged’s total funding to $3 million.
The business started with Hamrick trying to find a mushroom dubbed chicken of the woods, not exactly available in average grocery stores. That search led him to discover an avid but fragmented community around nonpsychedelic mushrooms on the internet. His new pitch was to bring them together and give them a place to sell their forest finds — what he describes as a growing, $13 billion market in the U.S.
“If you go on Facebook and type in your home county, state, town or whatever with mushroom behind it, I would almost guarantee that there is a group related to wild foods or mushrooms or something that probably has 500, a couple of a thousand people in it,” Hamrick said.
Hamrick, who previously worked in product innovation and sustainability at Anheuser-Busch and sales and operations at Recycle Track Systems, founded Foraged in April 2021 with his co-founder, and the company's chief product officer, Andy Conner, a nature photographer and web designer. Its early days were spent foraging for something else — funding — as it "seriously bootstrapped" its way up, a habit that still serves it well today, Hamrick said.
“I mean, we were spending like $300 a month on some Google ads,” he said. “It was in the thousands out of pocket in the early days. But, we made it work with open source tools, being scrappy, finding friends who could help with early legal things, finding friends who can help with early marketing things.”
The startup counts eight fully remote employees and, per its LinkedIn, three more locations beyond D.C., in New York, Denver and Los Angeles. Foraged's roster includes Iulian Fortu as its wholesale and restaurant sales lead. Fortu, a chef and self-described forager, had originally started his own business, Arcadia Venture, in 2018 to provide and sell wild mushrooms, plants, flowers and other specialty products to D.C.-area restaurants — a distribution business he had added to the Forage platform before becoming a full-time employee for the company.
With the new funds, Hamrick plans to beef up its software engineering team and build out more features for its platform, like more local pickup options, while finding more sustainable seafood and meat vendors to add to its marketplace and bringing its mobile app and website out of beta mode.
The goal is to turn the platform into a full-scale business solution for small-scale food producers where you can do everything from ship products from Oregon to Texas, execute a local delivery or select an item to buy at a farmers market.
Hamrick declined to give specifics on revenue but said Foraged had 400% revenue growth in 2022, and the number of repeat customers has increased more than 1,000% year over year, totaling nearly 1,000 vendors on the platform. It vets those vendors through what he said was an exhaustive application process that staffers go through individually, along with visits with each company before they join the marketplace. Once on a vendor is set up on Foraged's site, the latter company said it quality-checks each product listing, depending on its number of buyers on the marketplace. Foraged makes its revenue by taking a percentage of a customer’s purchases from sellers.
Company officials have pointed to inconsistent and sometimes vague regulations across the states and municipalities regionwide as a challenge. But it's scored big wins with customers in the D.C.-area restaurant industry, including Oyster Oyster chef Rob Rubba, who recently won the James Beard award for outstanding Mid-Atlantic chef.
“Even a world-class chef has challenges buying these types of food,” Hamrick said. “There's no better point of validation for us when a Michelin chef is like, ‘Hey, I can't get XYZ,’ and we already have it available. And everyday consumers can buy the same product.”
An earlier version of this article incorrectly spelled the name of Foraged's co-founder. He is Andy Conner.
