● B2B procurement marketplace, Prodo, counts Thyrocare, BlinkIt, Snapdeal, Delhivery, among its clients
● The 8-month old company was founded by ex-OYO and the Times of India employees and is backed by Titan Capital, LetsVenture, Abhinav Sinha – Global COO, OYO, Nimesh Kampani, cofounder, Trica and other marquee investors
Prodo, founded in May 2021, is a B2B e-commerce platform that provides manufacturing and end-to-end procurement of consumables. The company’s quick journey to achieve product-market-fit has been fueled by the lack of service in the current procurement process. The company is growing at 189% M-O-M and has onboarded marquee clients including BlinkIt, Snapdeal, Delhivery, Thyrocare, Sila Group and others.
70% of indirect procurement in India today is unorganised, with not a single player offering a full-stack tech-led experience. At present, when companies have to buy, they procure from unorganised vendors, traders, distributors, and traditional large manufacturers which have all kinds of manual coordination, no live tracking of orders and many man hours spent in interventions. As per a APQC report, operational inefficiencies in the procurement process can increase the buyer’s spend 5x.*
Prodo attributes its early traction to being the need of the hour. The purchase leaders across different enterprises are welcoming innovation to streamline their processes and drive efficiency in their organizations, the company says.
“The current options that exist in the market today are either SaaS, P2P, discovery platforms, thin stack or multi-supplier marketplaces. However, the service issue in the B2B buying experience cannot be solved with a thin-stack approach but requires an end-to-end full-stack model. We truly believe that within 3-5 years, 80% of B2B buying will be online. We are building a product for tomorrow that enables one-touch buying, micro-level tracking on 1000s of SKUs across client DCs, and delivers a B2C experience in B2B,” says Sameen Husain, Co-founder & CEO, Prodo.
Prodo’s platform can also be integrated with a company’s current ERP systems for a seamless experience.
BUILDING A DEMAND-LED SUPPLY NETWORK
Prodo operates on a Alibaba x Foxconn model. The company has onboarded 300+ manufacturers within 8 months of starting its operations. Currently, a large number of manufacturers are operating at 40%-60% of their manufacturing capacity.
“The biggest problem that small to medium manufacturers face today is a lack of sustainable demand. We are their business development partners. We have a purely demand-led approach to onboarding manufacturers. We bring them onboard after extreme diligence and only when we can see sustainable work-flow with them after mapping our pipeline,” says Abhiroop Srivastava, Co-founder & COO, Prodo.
The company sees exports and global selling as a major market opportunity. The global B2B e-commerce market is pegged to be $28 trillion by 2028. Combining this with India’s $1 trillion by 2025 manufacturing market, Prodo has set its targets on a massive market mix.
