[Funding alert] Procurement startup Procol raises $1M from Blume Ventures, Rainmatter Capital

Delhi-based commodity procurement platform Procol has raised $1 million in a seed round from Blume Ventures and Rainmatter Capital, an initiative by Zerodha funds.

Procol helps food, retail, and FMCG companies reduce their procurement and related supply chain costs and time. It is a networked procurement platform for live auctions, market rates, collaboration, and intelligent commodity insights.

The company said in a statement that it will use the funds to scale its procurement platform as well as to start deploying other applications around it.

Commenting on the investment, Gaurav Baheti, CEO and Co-founder, Procol, said,

“Procol’s auction platform has helped our existing customers such as Bikanervala see dramatic cost benefits. We are building on this success by adding related optimisation tools and intelligence to make this a full stack procurement suite. Sellers love Procol too, for they now have unprecedented transparent access to sell to these large enterprises.”

The company was founded by ex-Zomato employees Gaurav Baheti and Sumit Mendiratta. While Gaurav has worked with Google before, Sumit worked with OYO before working with Zomato.

Karthik Reddy, Managing Partner, Blume Ventures, who led the round said,

"Gaurav, Sumit, and the Procol team are rethinking the future of procurement. Agri commodity buying in India is a $400 billion large broken market riddled with inefficiencies. The rapid adoption of Procol’s auction platform by India’s leading agri buyers and sellers is a clear sign that the platform is fulfilling a long standing market gap and is thus making significant headway in one of the largest markets in India today."

Recently, Blume Ventures had also invested in Mumbai-based health-tech primary care services platform HealthAssure.

Speaking about the funding, Nithin Kamath, Founder, Zerodha, said,

“Commodities in India mostly run physically, and Procol is changing that. I was convinced of this when I first saw Procol’s product suite — the team is building an exceptional product for scale and there’s clear value for food enterprises to adopt them."

(Edited by Megha Reddy)

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