Engineering Services Platform VenWiz Raises Funding From Accel, Nexus

Industrial services platform VenWiz has raised $3 Mn in seed funding round led by Accel India and Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from Snapdeal founders’ Titan Capital, Five9’s Anand Chandrasekaran and Rajendra S Mehta, former Reliance Industries executive.

VenWiz plans to use this funding for talent acquisition, strengthening technology and business expansion. The company, which has less than 10 employees, will launch its pilot in Bengaluru and Hyderabad in the next 3-4 months, and plans to expand pan-India soon after.

The company was founded in 2020 by Rajesh Reddy and Sandesh Paturi to organise engineering services procurement in the manufacturing and allied industries by enabling managers to discover service vendors based on capabilities and past experience.

The Indian manufacturing sector recorded improvement for the third consecutive month in October 2020, with businesses growing production to the greatest extent in 13 years in the middle of robust sales growth. According to the IBEF report, investments in the Indian manufacturing sector has been on a rise.

Further, according to IHS Markit, India’s manufacturing purchasing managers index (PMI) increased from 56.8 in September 2020 to 58.9 in October 2020, which is said to be the highest monthly improvement in over a decade.

VenWiz elaborated that manufacturing units typically rely on offline processes to onboard engineering services providers across operations, maintenance and projects. These age-old systems — offline channels and incoherent networks or interfaces — lead to inefficiencies and lost opportunities.

“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,” cofounder and CEO Reddy said. Meanwhile, Accel’s Barath Shankar Subramanian added that VenWiz’s team is well equipped to solve this problem.

The cofounders Reddy and Paturi had worked together at ITC Ltd and have spent a larger part of their career running operations and projects. Reddy has previously worked at Mckinsey & Company, Adani Group, Capillary Technologies, Akruta and Bounce, whereas Paturi has experience with ETH Zurich and DuPont Nutrition & Bioscience.