Bengaluru, Feb 15: Venwiz, a SaaS-enabled marketplace in the Capex and MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Operations) services domain, has raised $8.3 million in Series A round of funding led by Sorin Investments along with participation from Accel, Nexus Venture Partners. JAFCO Asia, Riverwalk Holdings and Force Ventures.
Angel investors like Sanjeev Rangrass (ex-CEO ITC Agri Business), Anshuman Sinha (Partner, AT Kearney), Prabhav Kashyap (Partner, Bain & Co) and others also participated in the round. The company has earlier raised $3 million in seed funding, bringing the total capital raised by Venwiz till now to $11.3 million. The funds will be used for product enhancement and team expansion.
Venwiz is a SaaS-enabled marketplace, digitising capex and industrial services procurement, focusing on the manufacturing industry. Buyers on the demand side are large enterprise clients with manufacturing plants, having industrial services requirements. The demand is for a wide spectrum of service requirements, example: niche SPM requirement, ongoing capex jobs, or even greenfield projects. On the supply side, the companies that offer these industrial services are MSMEs, with specialised scope of projects e.g., mechanical, civil, automation, turnkey jobs. Venwiz has so far onboarded more than 10,000 vendors on its platform across 40+ service categories.
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.”
“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 have 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,” said Mandar Dandekar, Partner at Sorin Investments.
Venwiz is 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. It has contracts with companies like Nestle, TVS, ITC, Tata Coffee, Kohler Power and plans to deepen the client engagements after this round of funding.
Talking about the future roadmap, Sandesh Paturi, co-founder and CBO of Venwiz said, “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.” The company is also working on some pilots from a long-term perspective to enhance the vendor-side offerings and enhance client platform experience.