Manufacturing platform Keychain completed a $15 million Series A round of fundraising, valuing the startup at just over $250 million, according to sources close to the company.
Early-stage venture capital firm Box Group led the round. Existing venture capital investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and SV Angel also participated. The blockchain has also raised money from companies using the platform, including packaged food company General Mills and dairy maker Schreiber Foods. The investment follows Hershey’s $2.5 million investment in October.
“We’re adding people to our cap table that we know, that we trust, that can add tremendous value, that see the potential to build a category-defining company, ” said Oisin Hanrahan, CEO and cofounder of Keychain. good luck In an exclusive interview announcing the addition.
The Series A funding, which follows an initial seed investment last year, brings the blockchain’s total funding to $33 million. Deals with investors closed “within the last month,” according to Hanrahan.
Keychain is an online platform that connects food and beverage consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies with manufacturers who can create their products. CPG brands and retailers with their own private label brands can use the platform to find manufacturers who are capable of making specific products. For example, a retailer that wants to launch a store brand organic granola bar or a beverage company that wants to develop a new flavor of sparkling water.
“The basic thesis was simple. It was, we’re going to create a new operating system for manufacturing,” Hanrahan said. “We’re going to create a new way for brands and retailers to work together with manufacturers to create products.”
Paul Gallagher, chief supply chain officer at General Mills, said General Mills decided to invest in Keychain because of its experience using the platform, which shortened the timeline for manufacturing certain products.
“What used to take weeks or months can now be accomplished in minutes—and that’s incredibly important because consumer demands are changing faster than ever,” Gallagher said. “We are investing in Keychain because of the powerful impact it has made in its first year, and the limitless potential impact it has on the future of food.”
Based in New York, Keychain currently has more than 20,000 brands and retailers on the platform and facilitates $500 million worth of projects per month, the company said in a press release.
It was founded in August 2023 by Hanrahan, Amang Dua, and Jordan Weitz. Hanrahan and Dua were previously co-founders of Handy, an online platform for household services such as cleaning and handyman work. Hanrahan and Dua sold ANGI Homeservices, the parent company of Angie’s List, to Handy in October 2018 for approximately $164 million. Hanrahan served as CEO of ANGI from 2021 to 2023.
According to Hanrahan, Keychain expects to use most of the money to hire staff on its growing partnerships and customer success teams to handle the growing number of manufacturers on the platform. He added that the additional capital will also be used to improve the data assets of Keychain’s brands, retailers and manufacturers and improve the platform itself.
A capital raise in 2024 was not initially in the blockchain’s plans, as Hanrahan and the team only expected to raise money again in 2025. The blockchain raised $18 million in seed investment out of the gate in 2023. The company had not spent much. According to Hanrahan, that capital is still, and is expected to be, until 2026.
Hanrahan said the blockchain ultimately decided to take on additional money after investors approached the company wanting to invest.
Hanrahan said that in its Series A, Keychain raised less than its seed round, because the company “didn’t really need the money.” He says the blockchain still left “several multiples” worth of money on the table to avoid giving up too much equity.
Hanrahan’s experience at Handi informed his decision on how much money he took. “We don’t need to take more money just to take more money, just to write a bigger story,” he said. “I believe it would have been a great era if we were the first founders.”
When Handy was sold to ANGI, Hanrahan’s stake in the company was worth about $4 million, according to a 2018 SEC filing. Most of the sale price went to Handy’s investors.
“From end to end, the last one was 11 years — a long time,” Hanrahan said, referring to Handy. “If you’re going to do something again for 11 years, you’re going to be extremely vulnerable the second time around. So making sure you only take capital where appropriate in our mind.
Hanrahan said he decided to prefer to retain a majority ownership after advice from his wife, Orla, who is a partner at EY. He told her, “‘Look, you’re only going to get 10-year blocks in your life that you’re going to go and work on something,'” he said, referring to his time working on Handy. “So you need to compensate and reward that, and you need to feel a high degree of ownership.”
Hanrahan said Keychain’s growth plans include breaking into new categories, geographies and expanding into different parts of the supply chain. In addition to food and beverage manufacturing, new categories may include pet supplies, beauty products, or food supplements.
Hanrahan declined to say which new geographies the chain is targeting for expansion but said there are some obvious candidates, including the U.S., Canada, Italy, France and other European countries that sell many of its food and beverage products. Export. Hanrahan added that China has already seen interest from export development agencies in some of these countries.
Investors found the prospect of international expansion attractive. “What we’ve come to appreciate over the past few months is the incredibly important role that Keychain will play in global CPG commerce, and the import and export of food, materials and packaging,” said David Tisch, managing partner at BoxGroup. “From sovereign wealth funds to commodity exchanges to certification agencies, they all have a clear, strategic reason to engage with Keychain.”
Hanrahan said the chain also has plans to diversify its supply chain and go deeper.
“It’s a pretty interconnected supply chain if you think about it,” Hanrahan said. “A brand or retailer is a customer of a manufacturer, the same manufacturer on our platform, a customer of a packaging company, a customer of a raw material company.”
