Misfits Market, an online grocer specializing in delivering food that would otherwise be wasted, raises $200M Series C, source says at a $1.1B valuation
- Grocery delivery company raises $200 million in new funding — Company will use proceeds to expand its area of operation
Context & Ripple Effects
Misfits Market's $200M Series C at a reported $1.1B valuation roughly triples the pace of its last raise — the $85M Series B from July 2020 brought total funding to just $101.5M — and the stated use of proceeds is geographic expansion of its delivery footprint rather than new product lines.
The raise lands Misfits Market squarely in a race with GrubMarket, whose farm-to-consumer marketplace climbed from a $255M post-money in April 2019 through a ~$500M round in October 2020 to a $200M Series E at $1.2B+ from Tiger Global and BlackRock in November 2021. Both are monetizing produce that conventional grocers reject, and the valuations now sit on the same line.
First-order effects
- Misfits Market can extend delivery into new regions immediately, putting its 'ugly' produce subscription directly against GrubMarket's farm-delivery network in overlapping metros.
Second-order effects
- GrubMarket's later mega-round at a comparable valuation signals investors funding both sides of the same arbitrage — farms gain a second institutional buyer for cosmetically imperfect or surplus inventory instead of leaving it unharvested or dumped.
Third-order effects
- Food waste is consolidating as a fundable category attacked from both ends of the chain: Misfits resells what stores won't stock while Afresh's AI ordering software — a $115M Series B bringing it to $148M raised — prevents the over-ordering that creates the surplus in the first place, pressuring traditional grocery procurement to justify every rejected lot.
The trend: Capital is flowing into food-waste intermediaries at unicorn scale, turning cosmetically imperfect produce from a disposal cost into a priced asset class across the grocery supply chain.