Manufacturing is the processing of raw materials or parts into finished goods through the use of tools, human labor, machinery, and chemical processing. Have you walked into a manufacturing unit and took a look around to see the industrial ambience? You would have probably stuck in awe at the mass production of goods, the assembly line, the precision in the processes, the rhythmic roar of the heavy machinery, etc. The shop floor is where the real action takes place with managing the material, machinery, stores, quality control, staff and IT. How the shop floor managers get to manage the unit’s service vendors is a crucial factor for ensuring the continuous and smooth operations of a manufacturing unit.
The success of every manufacturing unit depends on engineering services providers for their requirements across operations, maintenance, and projects. Sadly, these service engagements are still not past through the age-old systems. The existence of offline channels and incoherent networks/interfaces often lead to inefficiencies and lost opportunities. Digitization is the need of the hour to increase efficiency and improve collaboration in this area.
VenWiz is an AI-powered industrial services platform transforming discovery, procurement and execution of industrial B2B services. It aims to bridge the gap by organizing end-to-end service engagements for every factory, from discovering the right service providers to collaborating with them and executing the job. Their mission is to be the ‘go-to’ platform for all managers seeking partners for engineering services.
This Bengaluru-based startup was founded in 2020 by Rajesh Reddy and Sandesh Paturi who met at ITC Ltd., and have spent a larger part of their career running operations and projects.
“Service vendors play a strategic role in the success of a manufacturing unit for driving scale of production or efficiency. Yet their journeys, in combination with shop-floor managers, have not changed for long and remained digitally underserved. We want to empower them with the right tools to collaborate efficiently with digital-first solutions.”
– Rajesh Reddy, Co-founder and CEO
The platform provides a seamless interface, intelligent filters and suggested job categories to make vendor search rapid and easy. Its proprietary algorithm matching users’ job requirements and plant profile to vendor capabilities and prior experience. Rigorous verification and relevance checks are carried out to ensure the validity of vendor information. This also saves stakeholders time and effort, especially helping them reach the shortlisting stage within a few minutes (a process that would otherwise take months). Vendors also get benefitted with a simple registration process, connections to qualified and high-value business leads, and introduction to relevant stakeholders, among others.
The company is launching its pilot in Bengaluru and Hyderabad and plans to expand pan-India soon.
VenWiz has recently raised $3 million in a seed funding led by Accel India and Nexus Venture Partners. The round also saw participation from other investors including Titan Capital, Anand Chandrasekaran (Five9) and Rajendra S Mehta (ex-Reliance). The startup intends to deploy the funds for talent acquisition, strengthening technology, and business expansion.
“As India prepares to become a $1 trillion manufacturing economy by 2025, having fast access to reliable and cost-effective service providers will become a key factor for companies in ensuring business continuity and healthy operating margins. Industrial services in India are very fragmented and unorganized with a broken customer experience. At Accel, we believe that the VenWiz team is well suited to solve this problem and we are excited to partner with them at this early stage.”
– Barath Shankar Subramanian, Partner, Accel
VenWiz could potentially be a game-changer disrupting the Indian B2B industrial services market.