ProcMart which (made from PROCurement Market) was envisioned on the foundation of making B2B transactions or procurement smoother, reliable, and most importantly faster. It was started by Anish Popli, Pratik Potnis and Saheel Joshi in Pune to solve the problem of procurement and sourcing.
Their team is a group of diverse people who have come together to address this issue of procurement and sourcing. Anish is an NIT Trichy graduate, and an IIM Lucknow alumnus. He worked for a couple of years in BHEL and Energo Engineering before starting up. Pratik on the other hand, is a computer science graduate and a serial entrepreneur. “I was with Cisco before starting my own venture Quexa systems. The venture was sold to a US-based company before beginning on ProcMart,” says Potnis. Saheel was a consultant at Deloitte before starting on ProcMart.
Well, it was while I was working for other companies, the spark that I have to do and create something on my own use to trouble me a lot at the night.
“When I was associated with BHEL, for a long time, I played a key role in the procurement department. And to be honest, procurement process is a very exhausting process, mostly in terms of vendor identification, vendor follow-up and other things. Procurement in most of the companies is also a lot procedural, wherein the procurement manager has to get a lot of quotations before making a purchase decision,” says Anish, the CEO.
The company aims to bring down the turnaround time per transaction in the B2B space to less than a day. “Our unique questionnaire takes the buyer through key questions to consider before making a particular purchase and lets us and our vendors understand the requirements precisely, which saves a lot of to and fro,” says the IIM Alumnus. The company is currently focused on automation, having systems and controls in place which will ensure a smooth scaling.
They have deployed an optimization algorithm, which helps them identify the best potential vendors for their buyers based on a variety of common and idiosyncratic attributes. Their team of 20 now is based out of Noida and Pune, and they will soon expand to tier-1 cities. “Our immediate plan is to launch a Mobile application which would save a great deal of time for our buyers and sellers and in turn make procurement much simpler,” says Saheel.
They were recently funded (for an undisclosed amount) in their Angel round by the CEO and founder of Indiamart, Dinesh Agarwal. The investor also believes that tech Oriented companies in the B2B space have a lot of scope. As a message for future entrepreneurs, Anish says, “Don’t let uncertainty take the passion of creating something out of you. Take that one step you have to, not just for yourself; it’s for your team, and it’s for making the world a better place.”
In the first 3 months of business, the startup saw a lot of ups and downs. “We started lean with maintaining simple excel sheet of buyers and suppliers and when we saw lot of traction in current environment we decided to build a web platform that would engage all the parties together,” says Joshi. It still takes a lot of convincing to ask people to publish their requirements through the website and simultaneously asking vendors to submit the quotations. “This is where we see our mobile app playing a very vital role,” he adds.
One of the belief’s the founders have is to ‘Stick to their idea’. “It may take time to blossom, but if you leave watering in the mid-way you make sure you kill the plant yourself,” says Pratik.