FrescoFrigo Launched an Equity Crowdfunding Campaign to Raise €500,000

Italian vending machine startup FrescoFrigo has launched a $559,000 (€500,000) equity crowdfunding campaign on Italian portal CrowdFundMe. The campaign, which gives the company a pre-money valuation of $6.7 million (€6 million), has so far raised over $102,000 (€91,000). The funds raised will be used by FrescoFrigo for the enhancement of technology (consolidation of the service provider and tech provider model), for investment in research and development, and marketing activities.

This is the second equity crowdfunding campaign for FrescoFrigo, which had raised $559,000 (€500,000) in June 2020, again on CrowdFundMe. The campaign had gone into overfunding in less than a week, raising almost $190,000 (€170,000) and had closed one month ahead of its natural deadline.

FrescoFrigo has so far raised a total of $3.9 million (€3.5 million), between debt and equity, through 4 rounds. The first one dates back to October 2018 from $559,000 (€500,000), underwritten by Giorgio Ponticelli (with a past in Just Eat), Embed Capital, the Cremona-based tool manufacturer Wonder spa, Pariter Partners, Metrica Ventures, and Pyramid. The second round, of $1.34 million (€1.2 million), had instead been closed in May 2019 and had been signed by Andrea Dusi (creator with Cristina Pozzi of the Emozione3 gift boxes, sold in 2016 to Smartbox), Mega Holding, Futuro Investimenti, Embed Capital, Metrica Ventures, Wonder spa and the leader in refrigeration for large-scale retail trade, as well as industrial partner, Epta spa.

In July 2019, FrescoFrigo closed a new investment round of $290,000 (€260,000), underwritten by Digital Magics and Club degli Investitori. Finally, it raised another $559,000 (€500,000) on CrowdFundMe in June 2020.

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FrescoFrigo makes vending machines, but with a new approach

FrescoFrigo was founded in September 2018 by Tommaso Magnani (CEO) and Enrico Pandian (president), former founder of Everli (formerly Supermercato24), and partner at startup Checkout Technology. Pandian is also co-founder of StartupGym, a startup incubator launched in early 2021 together with Tarek Fahmy and Giuseppe Balzano. Last December, Startup Gym closed a $1.7 million (€1.5 million) round. Of these, 850,000 came from family offices and professional investors; another 656,000 were raised through an equity crowdfunding campaign on the Italian portal CrowdFundMe.

FrescoFrigo makes vending machines, but with a new approach linked to the quality of food and advanced technology for reading the products chosen by customers.

The purchase and payment procedures are managed in a transparent way by integrated devices capable of reading the RFID of food (automatic information identification linked to electronic labels), prepared with genuine ingredients, and cooked or processed in kitchens and laboratories at a maximum of 500 meters from the installation, with daily renewal by 10.30 am and withdrawal of expiring products.

Consumers, thanks to the FrescoFrigo app (or a card), manage the digital wallet (payments and digital restaurant ticket entry) unlock the fridge door, and choose what to eat. Thanks to the IoT technology these vending machines are equipped with, the supplier-restaurateur can monitor the status of the fridge, modify the refil according to the liking of individual products and thus improve the offer, customizing it according to the preferences of consumers. The annual revenue for each fridge is estimated at 50 thousand euros, each manager bears the initial purchase cost of the customized fridge (about 900 euros).

From its inception in September 2018 to today, FrescoFrigo has evolved profoundly, investing in technology and improving the service, focusing efforts on developing a more efficient and complete dashboard, a simple, intuitive, and feature-rich app, an increasingly advanced tech compartment, and activities aimed at increasing customer satisfaction, optimizing costs and improving the product offer.

Today it counts on 120 refrigerators installed (of which 60 in 2021) in five countries: Italy, Great Britain, Austria, United Arab Emirates, and Canada. The issuer’s target customers include catering operators and food chains. FrescoFrigo innovates and revitalizes a market worth almost 16 billion euros in Europe (2017 data compiled by EVA – European Vending and Coffee Service Association). While, only in Italy, (the first nation in Europe with 800 thousand vending machines), it is worth 1.9 billion (data processed by Accenture for Confida, Italian Association of Automatic Distribution).

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(Featured image by Crystaltalks via Pixabay)

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