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B2B manufacturing and commerce startup, Nexprt has raised $5 million in Seed funding from Sequoia Capital India and Lightspeed.
The round also saw participation from early backers Titan Capital and other marquee angel investors.
The company plans to use the proceeds to scale the existing business and launch new business verticals in the manufacturing domain.
The Indian manufacturing and exports space is a $200 billion+ industry on a high growth trajectory with significant tailwinds in the form of global macro factors like supply chain diversification and massive government support through the ‘Make in India’ initiative.
Founded by Harsha Vardhan Kalipatnapu, Manav Garg, and Kunal Jain in 2020, Nexprt is solving this problem by building a full-stack vertical commerce business to standardize manufacturing. It is creating category-specific solutions, beginning with the home décor category and expanding to other business verticals, where manufacturing is similarly unorganized, in the next couple of months.
The team at Nexprt over the past year has built a sales team across multiple continents to open up demand channels and has also deeply invested in manufacturing-related innovations and processes, enabling the team to execute at scale in India, which was only possible in China and Southeast Asia till now.
Speaking on the funding, Harsha Vardhan Kalipatnapu, co-founder, Nexprt said, “Working with partners like Sequoia Capital India and Lightspeed from the beginning allowed us the comfort of focussing on building these key differentiators in the decor business. We built out a demand engine capable of predicting market trends and did a lot of product and process development on the manufacturing front, allowing us to reduce TAT and manufacture superior quality, new SKUs.”
“Today, these capabilities are helping us get on a high-quality growth trajectory, as demonstrated by a high percentage of repeat customers and increasing share of wallet from large clients, which we feel is the true marker for customer love in the B2B space,” he said.
While in 2021, the company was focused on identifying growth levers, the focus in 2022 is to rapidly grow in the home decor category.
“It is a very unorganized industry, especially on the manufacturing side. Manufacturers struggle with the dual problem of highly customized manufacturing needs from clients while lacking the capabilities to innovate and build new products with high aesthetic appeal. Building a scalable playbook was key. Process and technology innovation, data-backed catalog intelligence, and design and product teams spread across the globe have enabled us to build a very deep process and innovation-led industry moat that has seen great customer love. Our customers have quickly moved a significant chunk of their business to Nexprt both, from different vendors and countries, which gives us confidence that we are on the right track,” said Manav Garg, co-founder, Nexprt added.
Further speaking on the development, Kunal Jain Co-Founder of Nexprt added, “While the last decade has been about building horizontal commerce platforms, we think the world will quickly evolve into adapting vertical-specific deeply integrated businesses, where people will want to deal with companies that are high-quality one-stop solutions for their categories and businesses.”
With a state-of-the-art in-house manufacturing facility in Moradabad and another facility opening in Jodhpur in January 2022, Nexprt is on-track to building a one-stop decor solution in India for global clients, a value proposition that manufacturers haven’t been able to provide. The team is eyeing a 5x growth in the next few months in the decor business once these facilities are up and running.
Talking about the investment, Vaibhav Agrawal, Partner at Lightspeed said, “We met the Nexprt team and felt they were special founders we just had to be in business with, even before they had a customer or a product! Their focus from the get-go on both quality & leveraging technology to delight customers has been incredible. The southeast Asia — US/EU corridor has many gigantic opportunities across payments, logistics, commerce and we are excited to work closely with Nexprt to shape the future”
“Digitisation of the exports ecosystem in India is a massive opportunity. As the industry develops, we believe a larger share of global exports in several categories will move to this region. When we met the Nexprt team, we were very impressed by the nuanced understanding and insights they had in this space, making them well-positioned to capture what we believe is going to be a huge trend in the next decade, and Sequoia Capital India is excited to partner with them right at the outset of this journey,” Shraeyansh Thakur, Principal, Sequoia India added.
Nexprt also announced its plan to invest in new business verticals outside of home decor, to tap further into the $200bn+ market opportunity and play a stellar role in the shift of global commerce to India.