Officepulse secures $500K from Z Nation Lab, others
Officepulse, an e-procurement solution for businesses, secured $500,000 in equity and venture debt funding from a list of strategic investors in India and the US.
Investors Ashish Jain, Founder and CEO of Maxton Global; Pawan Poddar, Ex-Director from a consulting firm, along with other HNIs from India and the US, and Z Nation Lab participated in the round.
“The Indian office supplies market is highly unorganised with nearly 95 percent of all procurement and sales falling into this category. Hence, there is a significant scope of growth for organised players based on policy changes and the need for accountability and expense control by leading organisations and startups,” says Pushpamitra Das, Partner, Z Nation Lab.
Officepulse was started in 2017 by Darshan Bathija, Pradeep Bhat and Rahul Meena. It is an op-tech platform enabling businesses to bring efficiency in their assets and consumables procurement. It also offers customers multi-location delivery facilities across India.
In less than a year, the company has a customer base of companies like WeWork, 91Springboard, Wildcraft, Tata Global Beverages, Furlenco, Capillary, etc., and has direct tie-ups with renowned brands such as Pepsico, Diversey, HP, Honeywell, Lenovo, Unibic, Nestle, Dabur, ITC, and Kimberly Clark among others.
“Our tech-led approach has helped companies to ease the process of ordering supplies across departments and chain of command with simplified ordering and approval process to bring in system transparency,” says Rahul Meena.
According to a report by Beroe Inc, the global office supply market is estimated to be $247 billion, with the Indian market estimated at $30 billion by 2020.
Officepulse currently supplies products across categories like pantry, IT and networking products, office stationery, housekeeping and industrial appliances to its customers. The company plans to include office furniture and customised merchandising in its product basket on the back of growing demand from its existing customers. It has an end-to-end logistics set up in Bengaluru, Delhi, and Mumbai, and has chalked out plans to expand its presence to 10 more cities by the end of FY 2019.
Apart from Officepulse, the office supplies market has few other players like WorkStore, Amazon Business and startups like Power2SME.