Bengaluru: Venwiz, a SaaS-enabled marketplace in the Capex and MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Operations) services domain, has raised $8.3 million in a Series A round of funding led by Sorin Investments with participation from previous investors, Accel & Nexus Venture Partners. JAFCO Asia, Riverwalk Holdings & Force Ventures have also participated in this round, with angels like Sanjeev Rangrass (ex-CEO ITC Agri-Business), Anshuman Sinha (Partner, AT Kearney), Prabhav Kashyap (Partner, Bain & Co) and others.
– Projects worth INR 100 Cr+ posted on the platform in CY 2022
– Platform has 10,000 vendors across 40+ service categories
– Marquee clients include Nestle, TVS, ITC, Tata Coffee, Kohler Power
The company raised $3 million in seed funding earlier, bringing the total capital raised to $11.3 million. The funds will be used for product enhancement and team expansion.
Venwiz is a SaaS-enabled marketplace digitizing capex and industrial services procurement, focusing on the manufacturing industry. Buyers on the demand side are large enterprise clients with manufacturing plants having industrial service requirements. The demand is for a wide spectrum of service requirements- e.g. niche SPM requirements, ongoing capex jobs, or even greenfield projects. On the supply side, the companies that offer these industrial services are MSMEs with a specialized scope of projects, e.g., mechanical, civil, automation, and turnkey jobs. Venwiz has onboarded over 10,000 vendors on its platform across 40+ service categories, servicing the whole of India.
Rajesh Reddy, co-founder and CEO of Venwiz, said, “Venwiz was conceived with the vision of streamlining the capex lifecycle of a manufacturing company, in an end-to-end manner- be it vendor discovery, service procurement or job execution. It is a complex problem statement to solve, but the gains to our clients in terms of time & cost savings are immense.” The company has contracts with marquee companies like Nestle, TVS, ITC, Tata Coffee, Kohler Power and many others, and plans to deepen client engagements after this round of funding.
“Venwiz is addressing a huge white space in the manufacturing segment of different industries – procurement of industrial services for capex and MRO needs. On the back of their own professional experience, the founding team understands the pain points very well and has the insights to solve the problem through tech in an end-to-end fashion. The strong adoption of the Venwiz platform from enterprise clients and vendors demonstrates the need for such a solution,” added Mandar Dandekar, Partner at Sorin Investments.
Venwiz was founded by Rajesh Reddy and Sandesh Paturi, who met at ITC Ltd and have spent a large part of their career running operations and projects. The core team has deep professional experience in the manufacturing, project management, SaaS and consulting domains, thus providing a great launchpad for Venwiz.
“We have built modular tools that can assist across the entire lifecycle of capex projects. Our most popular and advanced offering is the Discovery module which offers deep intelligence on our verified vendor database. With this round of funding, we aim to onboard more talent, mostly in tech and business operations roles. We are also working towards broadening our client base and are in advanced talks with several enterprise companies,” explains Sandesh Paturi, co-founder and CBO of Venwiz, as he talks about the future roadmap.
Sameer Brij Verma of Nexus Venture Partners commented, “Venwiz has displayed growth and the potential to address the whitespace in capex procurement. This is evident from the backing of the investors from its seed-stage funding. “We are excited to continue to strongly back the Venwiz team on their mission to make enterprise-grade capex and industrial services procurement radically transparent and efficient via their SaaS-enabled marketplace platform. Venwiz has onboarded several Fortune 500 customers and over 10,000 vendors on the platform while allowing enterprise customers to discover, procure and manage their capex and industrial services procurement seamlessly.”
“According to industry projections, India’s manufacturing sector has the potential to reach US$ 1 trillion by 2025. The Indian industrial B2B services sector is massive, highly unorganized, and ripe for disruption. Companies need quick access to dependable, cost-effective service providers to ensure business continuity and good operating margins. At Accel, we believe Venwiz’s new-age platform and strong founding team are a formidable mix that can revolutionize this game”, Barath Shankar Subramanian, Partner at Accel, further adds.
The company is also working on many pilots from a long-term perspective to enhance vendor-side offerings and enhance client platform experience.
