- Venwiz a manufacturing focussed B2B industrial service market network raised $3mn led by Accel and Nexus Venture Partners.
- Venwiz aims to enable shop floor managers to discover right service vendors based on capabilities and past experience.
- MSMEs form a critical part of the manufacturing ecosystem, digitally enabling them to expand their business and upskilling themselves lead to improved prospects.
Bengaluru, January 27, 2021: Industrial services platform VenWiz has raised $3mn in seed round led by Accel India and Nexus Venture Partners with participation from other investors including Titan Capital, Anand Chandrasekaran(Five9), Rajendra S Meht(ex-Reliance). VenWiz is a platform transforming discovery, procurement and execution of industrial B2B services. The funds will be used for talent acquisition, strengthening technology and business expansion.
VenWiz was founded in 2020 with the goal of organizing service engagements in Manufacturing & Allied Industries. Every manufacturing unit relies on engineering services providers for their requirements across operations, maintenance and projects. Currently, these engagements are done largely through age-old systems - offline channels and incoherent networks/interfaces - leading to inefficiencies and lost opportunities. Shop-Floor managers and procurement managers do not have enough information to discover and collaborate with right service providers at their factories. On the other hand, service providers who are largely MSMEs do not have access to the right jobs and are disconnected from the opportunities that exist in the industry.
VenWiz.com 's proprietary platform aims to bridge this gap by organizing end-to-end service engagements for every factory from discovering right service providers to collaborating with them and executing the job.
VenWiz is founded by Rajesh Reddy and Sandesh Paturi who met at ITC Ltd and have spent a larger part of their career running operations and projects. Between them, having worked at companies like Mckinsey, Dupont, Capillary, Bounce, both have had exposure to running plant operations and large scale projects' execution. They experienced the gap in discovering the right technical and professional resources to work in manufacturing first hand.
Says Rajesh Reddy, Co-founder & CEO, VenWiz, "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".
Barath Shankar Subramanian, Partner, Accel, says, "As India prepares to become a $1Tn 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".
Sameer Brij Verma, Managing Director, Nexus Venture Partners, adds, " We at Nexus are thrilled to partner with the VenWiz team to support their vision on transforming the discovery, procurement and execution of industrial B2B services at scale using their technology platform. We believe the Indian industrial B2B services market is a very large but highly un-organised market waiting to be disrupted. Venwiz's new-age platform and strong founding team are a powerful combination and can potentially be a game-changer."
Manufacturing and allied industries form a greater part of India's GDP breaching the trillion dollar mark and growing at record speeds. Services form a significant (10-20%) portion of the value.