Grove, a Saudi Arabia-based agritech company, has closed a $5 million seed round led by Outliers VC, with participation from a group of angel investors.
Founded in 2024 by Mohammed bin Ghanam and Ayman AlFifi, Grove operates as a consumer-facing fresh-produce brand built on a vertically coordinated, technology-enabled supply chain. The company connects farms, markets, and households directly, aiming to reduce reliance on the fragmented intermediaries that dominate traditional produce distribution.
The model places Grove in a lineage of agritech startups that have attracted serious venture capital globally by promising to rationalise the notoriously messy farm-to-fork journey. China's Meicai raised at a $7 billion valuation on the premise of cutting out middlemen between farmers and restaurants. India's WayCool and Ninjacart have collectively raised hundreds of millions to do the same for South Asian supply chains. Closer to home, Morocco's YoLa Fresh raised $7 million last year connecting smallholder farmers with traditional retailers, drawing on playbooks from Latin America's Frubana and others.
What distinguishes Grove, at least on paper, is the consumer-facing orientation. Nearly all the well-capitalised precedents in this space are B2B plays, selling to restaurants, kiranas, or grocery retailers rather than directly to households. Grove is betting that Saudi consumers will pay for quality and provenance in a way that justifies the unit economics of last-mile delivery to individual kitchens (a thesis that remains unproven at scale in the region, though India's FreshToHome has made early inroads in the GCC with a similar D2C model for fish and meat).
Grove is positioning itself within Saudi Arabia's large but structurally challenged agricultural market. Local agricultural output is estimated at more than $30 billion annually, alongside significant imports of plant-based products. Despite this scale, the founders argue that supply chains remain optimised for durability and transport rather than freshness, quality, or nutritional value, leading to inconsistent produce quality and high waste. The critique is familiar to anyone who has followed the sector: decades of infrastructure built around shelf life and logistics convenience rather than what consumers actually want to eat.
Rather than operating as a marketplace or logistics layer, Grove is building a demand-driven model that aligns production planning, pricing, and distribution from the outset. By coordinating growers more closely with consumer demand, the company says it can improve predictability for farmers while delivering better quality and broader selection to end customers. The approach echoes WayCool's "demand-led" philosophy in India, which claims to have reduced food waste to under 2% and boosted farmer incomes by 15 to 30% through tighter forecasting and shorter chains.
The company reports repeat purchase rates approaching 48% and food waste reduced to below 5%, metrics it attributes to tighter coordination across the supply chain and shorter paths from farm to consumer. These are solid early indicators, though the real test will be whether they hold as Grove scales beyond its initial customer base (early adopters of premium produce tend to be stickier than the broader market).
The seed funding will be used to scale Grove's operations as it expands its network of partner farms and grows its consumer footprint. The company is positioning its model as a contributor to a more resilient and sustainable food system in Saudi Arabia, particularly as the Kingdom looks to strengthen domestic food security and reduce environmental impact.
A note of caution from the global playbook: Frubana, once Latin America's most promising farm-to-restaurant platform, raised nearly $290 million from SoftBank, Tiger Global, and others before shutting down operations entirely in 2024. The company blamed macroeconomic headwinds, but the collapse underscored how capital-intensive and margin-thin the fresh produce supply chain business can be, even with strong backing.
Outliers VC said its decision to lead the round was driven by Grove's integrated approach to the fresh-produce sector and the founding team's focus on long-term supply chain alignment rather than short-term volume optimisation.
