[Funding alert] B2B cross-border tech platform Geniemode raises $2.25M led by Info Edge Ventures

Global B2B cross-border sourcing and supply chain technology company, Geniemode, has recently closed its seed round of $2.25 million led by Info Edge Ventures. 

Angel investors including Deepinder Goyal, Kunal Shah, Prashant Malik, Pankaj Gupta and others also participated in the round.

Amit Sharma and Tanuj Gangwani, the co-founders of Geniemode, have spent the last two decades at ecommerce companies including Limeroad, Fabfurnish, and FashionandYou. During their stints, they witnessed several inefficiencies when it came to sourcing — right from finding the right suppliers to getting quality products delivered in time to buyers.

With Geniemode, they are building an end-to-end ecommerce platform to make global sourcing more efficient and convenient across fragmented and tech-strapped supply chains in furniture, home furnishing, hard goods, and fashion.

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Within just five months of launching the tech platform, Geniemode claims to have seen impressive adoption from global buyers across the US, the UK, Mexico, and India. The startup claims the buyers are reliably sourcing quality products from more than 100 MSME suppliers in India and Bangladesh. 

Amit Sharma, Co-founder of Geniemode, who has been part of the Indian sourcing industry for almost two decades said,

“The hesitation of large and small global buyers to source from India is mainly due to lack of access to reliable suppliers, poor transparency with respect to process and timelines, lack of standardisation of quality and unavailability of financing to the supplier.”

“Once these issues are resolved, the quality, depth of catalogue and cost differentiation offered by Indian suppliers can further contribute to the growing Indian exports across various differentiated product categories. Geniemode’s technology platform is set to play a huge part in achieving transparency, providing real-time visibility, standardising, and streamlining the process for both buyers and suppliers,” he added.

Geniemode’s platform allows catalogue creation and discovery, enables access to the right suppliers, and ensures that the entire process — starting from getting the samples developed and approved to shipping — is streamlined. Further, the platform ensures order visibility at each step, adherence to strict global quality checks and managing the end-to-end supply chain for the buyer, thus becoming a one-stop-shop for them. 

For the suppliers, Geniemode takes away all the hassles with respect to generating demand, doing quality control, managing payments and logistics. The manufacturers just need to excel in their core expertise of manufacturing quality products and Geniemode takes care of the rest. The company is already on track to scale to 1,000 suppliers from India and South East Asia doing over $50 million in annualised topline in the next six to 12 months. 

Tanuj Gangwani, Co-founder of Geniemode, believes that Indian suppliers have the potential to be price competitive on a global scale with superior quality. He said,

“We plan to unlock a high quality supplier base from India and SEA that is available to small and large buyers across the globe and become a one-stop sourcing platform for these buyers. More than 80 percent of the furniture, hard goods, home soft furnishing and fashion manufacturing is done by MSMEs across clusters in India. We are taking this market global and helping these suppliers scale.”

Kitty Agarwal, Partner at Info Edge Ventures, added, 

“We are seeing rapid digitisation of Indian SMEs across sectors but the cross-border commerce sector has seen limited tech adoption due to trust and reliability issues from global buyers. Geniemode is solving this challenge of digitising Indian exports by connecting quality suppliers with global buyers, managing end-to-end supply chain visibility, and standardising SLAs to ensure the quality of goods with timely delivery. The platform has rapidly scaled with a very high NPS and we are very excited to partner with such a passionate and experienced team.”

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