Team Startupcity

• Keychain raises $30 million to expand technology and growth
• Gurugram team set to double and lead engineering and product development
• Platform already supports top US retailers and consumer brands

Keychain, a U.S. startup that connects consumer brands with manufacturing partners, has raised $30 million in fresh funding to strengthen its technology and scale its India-based development team. Although the company is headquartered in New York, most of its engineering and product work is carried out in India, a strategy that has become central to its growth plan.

The startup plans to use the new investment to nearly double its team in Gurugram, Haryana, from 35 employees to 70 in the next few months, and to around 100 within a year.

At present, India already accounts for half of Keychain’s 70-person global workforce. About 20 employees are based in New York and the rest in Austin, Texas, handling partnerships, go-to-market strategies, and sales.

Despite serving only North American markets, Keychain has chosen to build its core technology operations in India. Gurugram, the country’s second-largest tech hub after Bengaluru, serves as the center for engineering, product design, and analytics.

This India-first development strategy supports Keychain’s consumer packaged goods (CPG) platform, which already helps major U.S. retailers and brands.The platform connects businesses with suitable manufacturers and is used by eight of the top 10 retailers in the U.S., including 7-Eleven and Whole Foods, as well as seven of the top CPG brands like General Mills.

Oisin Hanrahan, co-founder and CEO of Keychain, said the decision to base product development in India was deliberate. “It’s the talent, depth, availability, and the speed with which you can access talent of that depth and availability [in India]”, Hanrahan explained.

Keychain came into existence in 2023, formed through the vision of Oisin Hanrahan, Umang Dua, and Jordan Weitz. Dua, who is originally from New Delhi and also co-founded Handy with Hanrahan, played a major role in setting up the company’s Indian operations. Handy, a home services software startup, was later acquired by Angi. Their past experiences convinced the founders that India was the right location to build a sustainable and scalable engineering team.

Hanrahan shared that building strong engineering teams in the U.S. had been challenging during their previous ventures. At Keychain, the leadership wanted to create a team that could handle complex product development, scale quickly, and work on advanced areas such as AI while staying commercially focused. India, he said, offered the right talent pool and ecosystem to achieve this.

The move aligns with a wider trend among U.S. startups, especially in the SaaS space, who increasingly build engineering and product teams in Indian cities like Bengaluru, Gurugram, and Noida. Global companies are also setting up large offshore hubs in the country, often called global capability centers.

However, what sets Keychain apart is that it does not serve Indian consumers at all. Instead, it mirrors companies such as Deliveroo, Gojek, and Grab, which tap into India’s tech talent for R&D and product development without having a market presence here.

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Industry experts say India’s role as a global technology hub has become too significant to ignore. “India’s position as a global technology hub has made it a compelling destination for product development, even for startups that have no direct business in the country”, said Neha Singh, Co-founder of Bengaluru-based private market intelligence platform Tracxn.

She added that India’s time zone advantage also allows teams to continue working beyond U.S. hours, enabling almost round-the-clock development cycles.

With its fresh funding and India-focused development strategy, Keychain is positioning itself as a global player in helping consumer brands and retailers manage supply chains more efficiently, while proving once again that India is an unmatched hub for technology talent.