B2B building materials company Avysh brings builders, middlemen, manufacturers closer

Avysh.com helps create a bridge between builders, commodity manufacturers, and middlemen, bringing them together to a seamless conversational platform.

A building materials supplier for over 15 years, Vishnu Gowda made money during the real estate boom in Bengaluru.

However, over the last two years, the sluggish real estate sector has got the going tough as Vishnu has had to live off long credit cycles as builders delayed payments, and he had to borrow from the unorganised market.

On the other hand, steel and cement manufacturers would not give him credit, and strictly worked on a cash and carry model.

That is when Vishnu signed up with Avysh.com, a business to business e-commerce company that has helped create a bridge between builders, commodity manufacturers, and middlemen to come together on a seamless conversational platform to close purchases.

What Avysh does is that it captures Vishnu’s requirements, and those of the builders he supplies to, and then forwards the information to the manufacturers. “The platform allows immediate credit to intermediaries from suppliers, unlike earlier, and reduces dependence on builders,” says Tejas M Sati, the founder of Avysh.com.

Once there is credit from manufacturers, or their principal dealers, others down the value chain can free up their working capital to work with builders that have the ability to pay back on time. “This way the entire chain is accountable,” says Tejas. Avysh.com has sellers, buyers and middlemen ordering their requirements on the platform.

What does the company do?

The company creates a B2B commerce ecosystem, where the "middlemen" of B2B commerce are empowered, not eliminated. The platform tracks the price of products and the price of the credit, which is discovered dynamically. “This results in growth, where businesses selling products can transact with buyers while offloading credit and recovery risk of the transaction,” says Tejas.

He adds the Avysh conversational platform is powered by Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing technologies, and business transactions are powered by digital contracts, and ledgers of contracts, which help build trust.

Tejas (36) and his co-founder team Keerthan Shetty (33), Nachiket H K (35) and Sharanya (29) believe that since most of dealers don’t have an enterprise resource planning systems, their product, although an e-commerce platform, becomes the de-facto conversational platform for small businesses.

There are more than 50 million small and medium businesses in India according to consulting firm E&Y, and only around 1 million have access to any form of technology. The rest is a wide-open space that Avysh can target.

The founders are childhood friends, and conceived their business idea in 2014 after a discussion about the problems in the industry. Keerthan and Tejas were in real estate for several years and realised that the industry was working with price asymmetry.

The challenge, and opportunity, was to solve the problem by aggregating the ecosystem on to a common platform and build data around price transparency. They launched the company in late 2015, and went live with around 10 dealers who were in need of credit from manufacturers.

After a six-month pilot, where manufacturers were convinced that a seven-day credit would lead their dealers winning more business from builders, Avysh took flight in December 2016. Today, the company has more than 500 dealers and over 250 SME businesses on board.

“The key is to ensure that there is flow of credit between all parties,” says Keerthan.

The system needs builders to pay dealers in time for the chain to sustain itself. Tejas stresses on the conversational platform that Avysh is promoting, where there are live discussions between multiple parties. Today, Avysh is live only in Bengaluru, and hopes to go live across the country starting 2018 after its first fund raise.

The Avysh team did not disclose its revenue, yet as the business has grown this year, they founders have invested over Rs 2.5 crore in it.

Similar businesses in the industry include Moglix and Power2SME, both of which have raised VC funding. According to IBEF, the real estate industry will be $180 billion in size by 2020, which means there will be many more people building and buying houses.

Avysh stands a chance of growing if it manages to ensure credit is thoroughly managed in the ecosystem that works on personal trust. The only question is whether the ecosystem is ready to trust a digital system.