How Utham Gowda Built Captain Fresh Into a $1 Billion Seafood Empire While Competitors Collapsed
The investment banker turned CEO spent $6 million on market research, traveled 1.8 million kilometers, and acquired 10 companies to become the last man standing in global seafood tech
When Utham Gowda entered the password to wire $49 million from a flight between Chicago and Dubai, he was betting everything. The money represented nearly all the capital his seafood company had raised. The target was CenSea, a 60-year-old American shrimp importer doing $350 million in annual revenue, three times Captain Fresh’s size at the time.
If I had got that move wrong, that moment wrong, that was the end of Captain Fresh. We played it like a lion. It went after four or five tectonic moves which redefined the trajectory.
That 2024 acquisition now looks prescient. Captain Fresh is projecting ₹10,000 crore ($1.2 billion) in revenue for FY27, turned profitable in FY25 after years of losses, and is preparing for an IPO. Meanwhile, its well-funded competitors have either imploded under fraud allegations or quietly shut down.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
The Spreadsheet and the Pivot
Utham’s entry into seafood began with an Excel file, not a passion for the ocean. As an analyst at O3 Capital investment bank in 2015, he was hunting for the “next sunrise sector” using a ruthless framework: industry size above ₹25,000 crore, multiple companies exceeding ₹1,000 crore revenue, consistent profitability, and crucially, no smart capital deployed yet.
The way I got introduced to this category is possibly one of the most boring ways any entrepreneur would get into an industry.
Seafood topped his list, ahead of flavors and fragrances.
The numbers revealed a paradox. India produces 14.5 million tons of fish annually but exports only $8 billion. Norway, producing less than 2 million tons (one-seventh of India’s volume), exports $20 billion. The market cap gap was starker: all Indian seafood companies combined were worth under $2 billion, while Norwegian firms commanded $30-40 billion.
But Utham’s first attempt at Captain Fresh, launched in June 2020 as a domestic B2B marketplace, nearly killed the company. By early 2022, they’d scaled to $100 million in gross merchandise value across 20-25 Indian cities and raised $90 million over four months, hitting a $500 million valuation. Then Utham did something unusual: he admitted it wasn’t working.
The problem was India’s “Sunday non-veg syndrome.” About 70% of seafood consumption happens during roughly 200 hours per year, mostly weekends.
Those four hours in a Sunday, those 200 hours actually make up for 60-70-80% of the trade at the country level. If you build capacities to serve this demand, you will have such a significant portion of idle time.
The unit economics were brutal. Captain Fresh expected a 2% customer default rate. Reality delivered 7-9%. About 80% of India’s seafood is sold by hawkers who appear on weekends and vanish during the week, operators Utham describes as running “newspaper routes” with zero capital at stake. The company couldn’t compete with informal players who didn’t pay statutory dues.
Going Global Through Acquisition
Over 18 months, Captain Fresh executed what Utham calls “0 to 100 to 0,” shutting down domestic operations while pivoting entirely to export markets. But instead of building distribution from scratch in the US and Europe, he bought it.
The CenSea deal that nearly emptied the bank account was just the beginning. Between 2023 and 2025, Captain Fresh acquired 10 companies: Koral (Polish salmon processing with 26 production lines), Senecrus (French cooked shrimp for Carrefour), Ocean Garden (Mexican wild-caught shrimp brands), FishLog (Indonesian cold chain), Sekkingstad (100-year-old Norwegian salmon joint venture), and most recently, Frime, a Spanish tuna giant with €180 million in turnover.
The strategy wasn’t just buying companies, it was the deal structure. Captain Fresh uses equity swaps, convincing sellers to take stock rather than pure cash. Management teams stay on, incentivized by the eventual IPO upside.
It seems like I have gone around buying companies. But truth is, I have gone around selling Captain Fresh stock. That’s really where all my effort goes in.
The company spent roughly $120-130 million in equity value across all acquisitions, with 65-70% in cash (100% equity-financed, zero debt) and the rest in stock swaps. This approach avoids what Utham calls the three sins that kill M&A: overpaying in competitive auctions, using aggressive debt, and the “God complex” of changing management.
We only do deals where there is no competition. We have no debt. Zero management change.
Most deals take 18 months to close, in an industry where private equity and strategic buyers move slowly or don’t understand the opportunity.
The multi-geography, multi-species model became Captain Fresh’s moat when Trump-era tariffs hit. The US imposed anti-dumping duties on shrimp imports in 2024-25, with rates up to 25% for some Indian exporters. Single-origin competitors struggled. Captain Fresh thrived.
Because the company sources from India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Norway, Poland, Ecuador, and Mexico while distributing through owned US and European entities, it can reroute supply chains in weeks. In the first half of 2024, Asia supplied two-thirds of US-bound products. By 2025, that flipped: Latin America became two-thirds.
I thank Mr. Trump. Whatever he has done has brought out the beauty of our business model.
While Captain Fresh scaled, competitors collapsed. Indonesia’s eFishery, once valued at $1.4 billion and backed by Temasek and SoftBank, imploded in 2024 after investigations revealed it had inflated revenue by nearly $600 million. It claimed 400,000 smart feeders deployed; the actual number was closer to 24,000. UK-based Rooser, which raised $40 million from Index Ventures, entered liquidation in June 2025 after its pure marketplace model failed in a low-trust industry.
The Data Obsession
Utham’s edge comes from an unusual willingness to invest in research. Captain Fresh spent $5-6 million on market analysis as an early-stage startup, hiring McKinsey and Bain for top-down studies while Utham conducted fieldwork.
He visited 40 US cities over one month, two per day, examining 10-15 retail outlets in each, cataloguing fresh versus frozen ratios, country of origin, supplier names. The process repeated across five cities each in Spain, Italy, and France.
But the railway station method reveals his first-principles thinking. To understand India’s seafood supply chain, Utham sat in Bangalore and Chennai railway stations, observing thermocol boxes carrying fish. Each box displayed codes for destination, origin, and supplier. He mapped the entire network by hand, then deployed 20 people to replicate the exercise across India.
I don’t regret any of that [research spend] because the kind of clarity and speed that it has given us is the only reason why we are, in a span of four and a half years, the 20th largest player in the world when it comes to seafood.
This discipline extends to personal life. Utham has traveled 1.8 million kilometers over three years (three times the average Fortune 500 CEO) while transforming his health: from 94 kilograms at 40% body fat to 63 kilograms at 14.5% body fat, sleeping eight hours nightly with a resting heart rate of 47.
His frugality enabled the risk-taking.
If you give me ₹50,000 a month, I will survive. I don’t even own a car today. I can travel in bus, train, auto rickshaw. As a guy in the business of taking risks, if you are able to be a master Spartan, your ability to take risks compounds.
The Outcome
Captain Fresh’s financial transformation is stark. FY24 posted ₹1,395 crore revenue with a ₹229 crore loss. FY25 delivered ₹3,500 crore (151% growth) with ₹125 crore in EBITDA and ₹42 crore net profit. The company projects ₹5,000-5,500 crore for FY26 (EBITDA: ₹300-350 crore) and targets ₹10,000 crore for FY27 (EBITDA: ₹700-750 crore).
Return on capital employed, Utham’s preferred metric, jumped from negative to 8-9% in FY25, with targets of 20% this year and 27-28% by FY27. With 340-350 employees generating $640-650 million in revenue, Captain Fresh achieves roughly $2 million per employee.
The company filed IPO papers in August 2025, then withdrew them in December to complete the Frime acquisition without regulatory constraints on pre-IPO deal size. It plans to refile in early 2026.
For Utham, who left investment banking because it didn’t “compound” (you’re only as good as your last deal), Captain Fresh represents the opposite: a platform where every acquisition, every supply chain digitized, every relationship secured adds permanent value.
In investment banking, the only operating leverage you have is your time. Here, you have 100, 200, 500 people’s time operating on your vision. That compounding you have a share of.
The seafood industry remains a $600 billion market sitting on a $1 trillion balance sheet of fragmented assets. The largest player controls less than 1% market share. In most industries, that fragmentation would have already been consolidated. In seafood, the low-trust nature, perishability, and biological volatility kept it analog.
Until someone decided to treat it like a spreadsheet problem.
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