"Meat" This Entrepreneur India's 35under35 WinnerThis entrepreneur revolutionized the meat industry by building an online presence for his company

Blenders Pride Reserve Collection presents Entrepreneur's 35U35list included some path-breaking names from the field of entrepreneurship and Abhay Hanjura, the co-founder of Licious made it to the list for enabling aspiring entrepreneurs to have an online presence.

For Abhay Hanjura, the lure of entrepreneurship kicked in at the age of 28, while he had everything perfectly lined up for his career – a well-paying job with growth opportunity and prospects to head up a 500-member company. "A simple realization changed the course of what I wanted to do next. The need to push my limits to higher ground and go beyond the barriers of advancement was both transformational and a turning point for me," says Hanjura.

Hanjura always had a desire to build a consumer brand to address their everyday pain-points while being synonymous with trust and quality. Keeping that in mind, Hanjura in arms with his co-founder Vivek Gupta, after much deliberation and questioning, picked the meat sector as their area of service. The meat sector had already been infamous for being highly unorganized, lacking quality and safety standards, product inconsistency and lacking produce traceability. Reasoning their entry in such a market, Hanjura points out, "Vivek and I were quite quick to realize the possibility to be a part of $40 billion market, and opportunity to build a food brand which will change the course of how people view, buy and consume meat and seafood." And, soon Licious' journey took off in 2015.

Starting with an initial external investment of USD $1 million, the investment amounts only climbed an upward graph as it started bagging investments in millions; each investment getting multiplied by almost two or three times from the last. "Post our Series D round which was led by public listed Japanese conglomerate, Nichirei Corp and our existing investors, we find ourselves at a vantage point and extremely bullish about our plans over the next 2 years. We are not looking to raise any more funds in the immediate future," he states.

Now the company has already managed to serve over 300,000 customers, with over 90% repeat consumption across Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and more recently Chandigarh. Hanjura, who believes that the "secret sauce' of any business is consistency of overall experience, says, "The fact that we have been able to scale NCR at 2X the speed of Bangalore keeping the vital financial metrics intact is a big win for us. The best part about this is, even with the massive scale, we have been able to demonstrate a higher repeat percentage in our newer markets."

This year with Licious, he has been able to take the local startup to a nationally recognized brand. "We have witnessed a 300% growth over a period of 3 years and are a profitable company today in Bangalore & Hyderabad and new market will continue to see investments from us in the coming years," he concludes.