Today, the manufacturing business has segmented into two different buckets leading to a loss in finance. NowPurchase helps bridge this gap between the two buckets of purchase and production within organisations.
Commenced four years ago in 2017, NowPurchase is focused on revolutionising industrial procurement and creating an authentic, self-contained platform that aids metal producers in their purchases. It encompasses sectors like iron and steel, non-ferrous metals, along with foundries and castings.
In such a short period, the company has already been a significant player in the market. They have scrutinised the market and discovered that the purchase and production teams work and exist in silos, and procurement has become exceedingly inefficient. This understanding brought them a ten-fold growth since the date of inception.
The emergence of NowPurchase
It all started in 2017 by Kolkata-based cousin brothers Aakash and Naman, who belonged to a family business of manufacturing. They initiated the concept of fusion of technology with the metal manufacturing business. Even their own family business administered in Calcutta was lagging in technology adoption.
Aakash believed that the procurement of essential goods and consumables was still fragmented and broken. On the other hand, Naman had the experience of working with different startups in Singapore and the United States. Naman’s expertise helped him acknowledge first-hand the benefit of technology to bolster the business. Together, Naman and Aakash thought there should be some setup where manufacturing business can be carried out easily with the help of technology. NowPurchase was the ultimate result of the void generated by their family business and their beliefs.
“Metal is the primary building block or backbone of the physical world and will remain so in the foreseeable future. As a result, it is critical that we are able to manufacture metal efficiently. The source and quality of raw materials have a significant impact on metal manufacturing efficiency. NowPurchase is a one-stop procurement platform for these raw materials, and we believe that efficient raw material sourcing can have a significant positive impact on the metal manufacturing industry.” says Aakash Shah, Co-founder of NowPurchase.
It started primarily as a technology platform for the industrial procurement of tiny industrial parts and led them to fix the sourcing issue 18 months down the line. The company turned its attention to addressing this issue by providing metal manufacturing companies with tech-enabled production-driven procurement, allowing them to optimise procurement based on their manufacturing process. This is how NowPurchase came into existence.
The team that made it happen
It was founded by Naman Shah, the CEO of NowPurchase and co-founder Aakash Shah. Naman was instrumental in conceptualising and scaling NowPurchase, and as a CEO, he is primarily responsible for the company’s growth and expansion. He kickstarted his career with Ernst & Young, then worked as a Business Development Manager at FreshMentors (Silicon Valley-based ed-tech startup), and then as the Director of Asia Pacific Region at BizEquity (US-based fintech startup), where he led the company’s expansion in Asia. Naman set out on his entrepreneurship journey armed with a bachelor’s degree in Economics from the National University of Singapore and completed his schooling at St. Xavier’s Collegiate School, Kolkata.
The co-founder, Aakash Shah, is a seasoned entrepreneur with a deep understanding of mechanical engineering, rural marketing and B2B consultative selling. Their focus was to assemble a team with a diverse background since the inception of their business. The duo has professionals from various educational backgrounds, some of them having more than 10–15 years of experience. Their credo was to build a diverse team because they feel that a difficult problem like this requires people with both expertise and fresh perspectives. The NowPurchase team consists of around 35+ people, with aggressive plans to grow its business and product teams in subsequent years.
NowPuchase bringing a difference in the manufacturing industry
NowPurchase, a startup created through the minds of two geniuses having experience in different startups at the national and international level, took advantage of their better insights and tackled the most pressing issue of time constraints plagued by the manufacturing industry.
The simple and most common technological tool, the WhatsApp bot, is itself doing wonders in the market generated by NowPurchase. This futuristic thought inculcated WhatsApp bots for product information, pricing, and order deliveries whenever they choose to. The intention behind this thought was to save time and utilise that energy to increase their global reach. This ultimately assisted them in the procurement platform for all metal manufacturers by offering a comprehensive variety of services and solutions.
With the adoption of the WhatsApp bot, NowPurchase witnessed that around 80% of consumers utilise this medium, among other things, see prices, follow deliveries, raise quotations, and connect with their account manager. Being an owner of the WhatsApp bot, it provides pricing transparency and proprietary software called MetalCloud that optimises the production process.
Apart from this, people have also adopted technology as the way of the future, resulting in a strong adoption of their MetalCloud software. Factories are using their proprietary algorithm to optimise their production process. With their unique fusion, they contribute a lot to updating the people with technology and assisting them to be techno-friendly.
NowPurchase creating their mark
NowPurchase is functional in the metal manufacturing industry, a $140 billion market, with $70 billion spent on the procurement and raw materials. It has witnessed remarkable growth in such a short period. It is a fast-growing market, with infrastructure and automobiles rising at 15 to 20% per year, with more sourcing from India than from China.
They currently focus on a sub-segment of the foundry market worth $20 billion and spend about $10 billion on procurement and raw materials. They primarily proffer three things in the market which makes them unique from others. These are:
- Establishing transparency in an unstructured market through their real-time WhatsApp price bot and pricing dashboard.
- Secondly, they aggregate materials from many categories into a single window with a strong technical team.
- And thirdly, they provide proprietary metal manufacturing optimisation software known as MetalCloud.
These peculiar characteristics make NowPurchase idiosyncratic in the market. Their presence in the market turned the notion that technology is of no use to the metal manufacturing business, as now the world is witnessing the fusion of technology in the manufacturing business, assisting in easing these manufacturers’ tasks. Apart from the national market, they are also attempting to expand it globally.
NowPurchase gearing up for a competitive global market
To stand in the global market, collaboration and coordination play a pivotal role. NowPurchase is on its way to the global league in such a short span of its existence. They recently raised 2.4 million USD in a seed funding round led by Orios and InfoEdge Ventures.
Angel investor Neeraj Arora (ex-WhatsApp global business head & Co-Founder HalloApp) also participated in the round. They had the aspiration to expand their procurement business by building a global supplier base and expanding into other parts of India. Having a deep understanding of the sector allows them to stay competitive and better serve this market along with a strong layer of digitisation at the manufacturing level. Additionally, NowPurchase will also utilise the funding to bolster its technology team to improve its procurement platform’s capabilities and industrial intelligence software, MetalCloud.
As far as competitors are concerned, they presently have no digital players focusing in this space, but there is competition in the traditional market, where there are many indirect competitors such as large traders and organised manufacturing houses. Given the nature of this industry, category leaders like Inframarket, Mobilix, and Zetwork exist, and many B2B commerce firms could emerge in the future. But NowPurchase is doing exceptionally well and has a clear and outstanding plan by which it can maintain its dominance in the market.
Overcoming challenges along the way
Since its inception, NowPurchase has faced several challenges. The biggest challenge for NowPurchase was that industrial procurement is exceedingly complex and has a different side compared to an individual. But its performance manifests that these problems are catered to according to their needs and requirements.
It entails much more than simply purchasing one item to create another. quality, delivery, punctuality, and, to a lesser extent, price are the most common issues. The importance of punctuality cannot be overstated. Although the price must be lower, this is of little benefit unless the quality and delivery assurances are provided. But they confronted this challenge with utmost sincerity and responsibility, which resulted in the ten-fold growth of the business.
The finished products are entirely dependent on the quality of the parts and raw materials used. The procurement team ensures the quality of the finished goods by checking that the parts are of a specific standard in terms of physical description, metal/chemical composition, correct/accurate measurements, and performance criteria.
With the rise of supply chain integrations and lower inventory levels, on-time delivery has become an increasingly vital aspect of achieving success.
Large stockpiles and production capacities were traditionally necessary to ensure on-time delivery. Due to enhanced information systems, deregulation, agile manufacturing organisations with flexible equipment and tooling, and sophisticated logistics systems, integrated supply chains no longer require vast, expensive inventory buffers to adapt to unforeseen occurrences and variations in demand.
Another component that challenged the potency of NewPurchase was cost. Costs have always been significant, especially in today’s global economy, where SMEs frequently encounter unexpected pricing discrepancies. This challenge was also tackled with the convergence of enhanced high-speed communications, lower transportation costs, widespread access to technology, and good management techniques.
It is pertinent to note another significant problem that NowPurchase was squared up with is that dealing with businesses entails a lot of trade or industrial credit, which differs significantly from dealing with individuals. Furthermore, the commodities acquired are highly technical, and many of them are obtained from a range of vendors, some of whom are organised and others who are not.
But the persistent whack gave them an edge over other startups and companies. They generally resolve market challenges by taking different current inputs, plugging data into the software, and determining the most optimal way to make their end alloy. They recommend and deliver the appropriate raw materials as a procurement solution, depending on the manufacturing process. To put it more simply, supply variance and supply quality, credit piece, and ultimately delivery and timeliness are critical.
The aims and aspirations of NowPurchase: Route towards success
Being one of the escalating businesses in today’s market, NowPurchase has an overarching goal to make procurement for metal production industries autonomous and efficient. They initiated their foundry business in the year 2020 in September, and their endeavours bore fruits; from then, the recorded growth has been tenfold. They have approximately 100 foundries on the platform now, with 65 to 70 dealing with them monthly. In the next 12 to 18 months, they would have more than 500 foundries on their platform. In terms of clusters, they currently operate in one, West Bengal, and hope to expand to three to four other clusters by the end of this year. Apart from these, they have also raised our first round of funding of $2.4 million led by Orios Venture Partners InfoEdge Ventures recently, and we’re almost at the stage where they’ll be doubling their monthly figures from where they are now.
