Supply Chain Labs announces 11 startups for Cohort 2020

October 6, 2020: Supply Chain Labs, which is backed Lumis Partners, today announced its Cohort 2020 under which it will mentor and handhold 11 startups, selected from applications of 600+ startups, that are solving a wide range of supply chain problems across a diverse set of industry verticals.

The six-month program to accelerate them with funding, corporate + investor connects will focus on strengthening supply-chains in post-Covid era. Supply Chain Labs claims to be the first and largest logistics focused rapid scale-up program for early/growth -stage startups in India and Southeast Asia.

Prajakt Raut, managing partner, Supply Chain Labs, said, “We were overwhelmed with the quality of applications this time around. The problems/ opportunity areas have shifted significantly in the post-Covid world, and I am delighted by the adaptability of the startups to pivot their existing models and build for the new order.”

Ashutosh Mayank, managing partner, Supply Chain Labs, said, “Supply chain is the backbone of the economy, and it's high time we all start encouraging the startups which are finding innovative solutions to the new challenges and priorities of supply chain in organizations. Our program is a small attempt at doing so.”

11 startups

1. Edgistify: Founded by IIT graduates Kamal Kumawat and Umang Shukla along with second-time entrepreneur Antim Suman, Edgistify provides a data-driven decision support system for warehouse discovery, decision making & control, and a single window to discover and track all MHEs. The startup has aggregated 1,000 million sq.ft+ of space to build a proprietary database.

2. Statwig: Statwig provides an end-to-end track and trace solution, at an SKU level, for complete supply chain visibility using blockchain technology. Founded by Sid Chakravarthy, Ravi Kumar and Harsha Kethineni, Statwig’s solution is of immense importance in these times. The startup is working with UNICEF as well as the Telangana government to prevent black marketing or hoarding of COVID19 vaccines once they are developed.

3. Eunimart: Founded by Shayak Mazumder and Archana Shah, Eunimart is a complete end-to-end omnichannel trade and commerce management platform. The company's AI-based platform provides listing on global marketplaces and new export sales channels to SMEs in sectors such as jewelry, apparel, handloom etc. and a dashboard to manage all backend retail operations.

4. Koinearth: Founded by Dr Praphul Chandra, who holds a PhD in Game Theory and Mechanism design, MarketsN eliminates data silos from the supply chain to increase efficiency, reduce inventory costs and time spent on invoice reconciliation. It is a blockchain-based solution for companies to record all transactions from shipments, invoices, returns etc. with their upstream and downstream suppliers. The platform will have a Covid positive impact by enabling safer supply chains through paperless transactions / digital twins of supply chains.

5. Reshamandi: Reshamandi is India’s first digital platform for the silk supply chain that provides the right quality inputs, technical advisory and market linkages to sericulture farmers. Founded by Mayank Tiwari and Saurabh Agarwal, Reshamandi helps in increasing the income of silk farmers by reducing wastage and allowing farmers to demand better prices for their produce. They help farmers to avoid the crowded markets, focusing on safety by providing access to proximity sourcing centres.

6. Qzense: Qzense uses a unique combination of NIR spectroscopy and artificial olfaction to grade fruit and vegetable quality with high accuracy. Founded by Rubal Chib, an IIT graduate and former Senior R&D Engineer at Havells, and Dr Srishti Batra, who holds a PhD in Computational Biology from NCBS-TIFR, Qzense aims to reduce wastage and enhance quality control in a highly inefficient food supply chain in India.

7. Frontier Markets: Founded by Ajaita Shah, who has over a decade of experience in rural markets and microfinance, Frontier Markets serves as a rural distribution platform for companies and an assisted e-commerce platform for rural consumers through its micro-entrepreneur led Saheli App. In light of Covid, the company quickly pivoted its work to help the Rajasthan government distribute essential goods and services in health, agriculture, hygiene, and food to 2,000 villages to help reduce the supply gap to rural households.

8. Mytrux: Founded by Nitin Parab, an industry veteran with 20+ years of experience in International & Domestic Freight, Logistics & Supply Chain, Mytrux is a cloud-based platform that manages the first mile & last mile container business, commanding container e-commerce & digital footprints across logistics to manage e-LR , e-Invoice & e-POD.

9. SmartShip Hub: Founded by Joy Basu, SmartShip Hub is a unified digital platform for global maritime enabling “shared services” & “on-demand vessel management services” for optimum asset utilization. Some of the key differentiators include Machine performance advisory for predictive diagnostics, on-demand procurement integration for spares and remote command and control with video support for maintenance.

10. Aerchain: Aerchain is a Saas-based, sector-agnostic B2B procurement platform that automates procurement activities for large organizations. Founded by Harsha Kadimisetty and Himavanth Jasti, graduates of BITS Pilani who are starting their second venture together, Aerchain helps companies realize cash savings, reduce transaction costs, and increase visibility across the value chain.

11. Invento Robotics: Founded by Balaji Vishwanathan, Mahalakshmi Radhakrushnan, and Bharath Kuma, Invento Robotics builds autonomous robots that can map and navigate complex indoor environments and bring smartness to physical spaces. During Covid, their customer-facing robot Mitra helped take care of patients across 6 countries -- India, USA, Australia, UAE, Singapore and Qatar.

Focus on e-commerce supply chain
A program designed specifically for start-ups in the supply chain makes more sense post the Covid-19 induced lockdowns that disrupted the supply-chains globally. A large percentage of startups, close to 15% have started looking at the e-commerce supply chain as a value driver for the economy going forward.

The slew of selected startups is working at the forefront to partner with government/s to help distribute essential goods to rural households as well as tackle the challenges in the post-Covid world like ensuring a fool-proof supply-chain management system to prevent any black-marketing of the Covid-19 vaccine, enabling all paperless transactions of supply chains across multiple verticals etc.

The second edition of the program by Supply Chain Labs got 600+ applications, with an interesting mix of startups. Some of the statistics pertaining to the startups are as follows:

● 14 percent of startups attempting to solve multimodal problems and 13 percent solving the varied problems pertaining to procurement which has become really inefficient in the current day and times
● 75 percent of startups were B2B, with 25 percent solving B2B2C and B2C problems
● We were surprised to see even Series A and Series B startups applying to this program, which is a strong affirmation of the value proposition we have put together for the startup community
● The majority of the startups are bootstrapped with less than 5 Lakhs of revenue per month, but close to 15 percent startups that applied were really mature with MRR > 50 lakhs per month
● Close to 11 percent of startups that applied had at least 1 woman co-founder, and 4 out of 11 startups we have selected has at least 1 woman-cofounder, with 2 of them having only woman founders/co-founders.