Procol, a Delhi-based procurement startup, said Tuesday that it has raised $1 million in seed funding from early stage investor Blume Ventures and Rainmatter Capital, an initiative by stock broking platform Zerodha.
It helps food retail companies reduce their procurement and related supply chain costs via a networked procurement platform — a single place for live auctions, market rates, collaboration, and intelligent commodity insights — which helps businesses save huge amounts of cost and time. The fund raise will help Procol scale their procurement platform and start deploying other applications around it.
Procol, short for Procurement Protocol, was founded by Gaurav Baheti (ex Google and Zomato) and Sumit Mendiratta (ex OYOand Zomato).
“The opportunity case for Procol emerges from India’s inefficient food supply chain system, itself built on the back of India’s fragmented agriculture market, struggling with limited use of technology, several additional layers of intermediaries and non-standardised/non-graded products,” the startup said in a statement.
“Procol’s auction platform has helped our existing customers such as Bikanervala see dramatic cost benefits. We are building on this success by adding related optimization tools and intelligence to make this a full stack procurement suite,” said co-founder Baheti.
Blume Ventures is currently investing from its $80 million third fund which it is in the midst of raising. It achieved a first close of $40 million in October last year.
Source: Mint