Gurgaon-based A Series A round headed by Nexus Venture Partners raised $7 million (about Rs 57 crore) for CapGrid, a B2B cloud manufacturing firm for precision parts and components. The current investors Anicut Capital and Axilor Ventures, which were established by Infosys co-founders Kris Gopalakrishnan and SD Shibulal, also participated in the round. The business most recently received Rs 4.1 crore from Anicut, Axilor, and Firstcheque in its seed fundraising round in November 2021.

According to CapGrid, their supplier network of more than 300 partners is presently used to manufacture more than 5,000 different precision components. Manufacturers may simplify their direct material sourcing and procurement processes by utilising CapGrid's AI-powered platform and supplier network. With these tools, firms may speed up the sourcing process.

CapGrid's co-founders Dheeraj Tiwari and Himanshu Singh Raghuvanshi said that the company, which primarily serves original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and tier-1 suppliers in the automotive sector, will utilise the funds to expand its team, scale up its warehouse presence across major automotive zones and add to its cloud manufacturing capacity. In the automotive sector, a tier-1 supplier is a vendor that directly supplies parts to the OEMs, a tier-2 supplier provides parts to a tier-1 supplier, and so on.

“Primarily, we are targeting three things. A decent amount will go into building our team. We recently expanded from 24 people to around 45 people. We will also invest in our MSME partners to increase the utilisation levels of our 25 most hungry suppliers,” Tiwari, who is the company’s chief executive, said. Adding to that, Raghuvanshi, who is CapGrid’s COO, said: “We have warehouse presence in six cities. There are 12-15 important manufacturing zones in India. As our pipeline grows, our aim is to grow into all of these 12-15 key zones over the next year”.

Currently, the company has warehouses in Hosur, Pune, Rajkot, Jaipur, Faridabad and Roorkee. It plans to open warehouses in Manesar and Chennai within the next three months, Tiwari said. In a statement, the company said that CapGrid partners with warehousing and logistics players in an asset light model. CapGrid, which was founded in 2020, logged revenues of around Rs 6 crore in the year-ended March 2022, and is expecting to report revenues of Rs 45 crore in FY23.

According to Sameer Brij Verma, managing director of Nexus Venture Partners, "They (CapGrid) are already collaborating with top OEMs on strategic initiatives including indigenisation, light-weighting, EV transition, procurement consolidation, and value engineering."

"We believe India will become a global manufacturing leader in the coming years, and we believe CapGrid will increasingly be a partner of choice for OEMs wanting to establish high-quality and agile supply chains while dramatically enhancing profits and OTIF (on-time in-full)," he continued. The ability of a provider to meet delivery agreements is referred to as OTIF.