Karma, a food-ordering app for buying and selling surplus food from 1,500+ food outlets in London and Sweden, raises $12M Series A led by Kinnevik
Around one third of the food produced each year — 1.3 billion tons of it — is either lost or wasted, according to data from the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization.
Context & Ripple Effects
Karma's $12M Series A lands mid-2018, weeks after order-ahead app Ritual raised its own $70M Series C, part of a wave of capital into mobile food-ordering models. What distinguishes Karma is the supply side: rather than adding convenience to fresh orders, it monetizes surplus that 1,500+ outlets in London and Sweden would otherwise write off.
The years after this round validated the thesis on both sides of the ledger. Misfits Market's $200M raise at a reported $1.1B valuation and OLIO's $43M Series B, anchored by Tesco putting 2.7K stores on the platform showed food-waste resale scaling into a real category. But Oda's ~$151M raise at a ~$353M post-money, down from ~$900M — also backed by lead investor Kinnevik — is the cautionary counterpoint on grocery-adjacent economics.
First-order effects
- Karma gets runway to deepen density in London and Sweden, while its 1,500+ outlet partners gain a working channel to convert end-of-day surplus into revenue instead of disposal costs.
- Kinnevik adds an early position in surplus-food marketplaces, a bet it doubled down on later through grocery delivery via Oda.
Second-order effects
- OLIO's route to scale — Tesco adding thousands of stores — sets the competitive template, pressuring Karma to move beyond individual outlets toward chain-level retail supply agreements.
- Misfits Market's reported $1.1B valuation gives later-stage investors a pricing benchmark for the category, raising the bar for what Karma must show before a Series B.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, surplus stops being waste-disposal overhead and becomes a managed inventory channel inside major grocers, with platforms like Karma and OLIO competing to be the routing layer.
- Oda's steep markdown under the same lead investor signals the structural risk: these marketplaces sit on top of grocery-delivery economics, so a downturn in that layer reprices the whole stack regardless of waste-reduction traction.
The trend: Surplus-food marketplaces are maturing from consumer novelty into a funded category where retailer waste becomes sellable inventory — with their valuations ultimately tethered to the grocery-delivery economics beneath them.