Why we are excited about our investment in Prolance

Building the Operating System for the tech-laggard Home Interiors industry

Image by Spacejoy via unsplash

The Interiors market today continues to be highly fragmented despite the efforts of several full stack players. Companies such as Godrej Interio, Livspace, HomeLane, and a few others hold approximately 15-20% market share. The remaining 80% is fragmented and run by a plethora of smaller players.

The latter group has rudimentary tech at their disposal. While they predominantly use SketchUp modelling, other processes, right from quote generation arising from design changes, conversion of design to manufacturing specs, BOM generation, procurement of raw material for manufacturing to installation, are very much manual. This has resulted in a broken customer buying process and experience, characterised by delays and unpredictability.

Below are some key challenges in the Interiors market in India:

• Highly manual, people-dependant processes for conversion of design documents to manufacturing specs, resulting in errors, quality issues, and rework.
• Multiple vendors (Upto 7–10 for a single project) with inter-dependencies amongst them for sizes, designs, etc.
• Lack of consistent quality/reliability across manufacturing.
• No single, unified system across designers, suppliers and manufacturers, leading to multiple file formats for a single project.

The ‘Prolance’ solution

Prolance is a SaaS-based marketplace platform providing a software solution, manufacturing-as-a-service, and material supply to the Interior Design industry.

Prolance has four main offerings for the designer:

1. A SaaS solution that helps them generate reliable quotes/BOM upfront

2. Automated creation of manufacturing specs, BOM, project-based finished goods inventory tracking

3. One-stop vendor to source raw material, resulting in better prices and efficiencies

4. Efficient manufacturing-as-a-service through white-labelled factories

The greater impact and vision is to be the ‘Operating System’ for the fragmented long tail of the industry, connecting interior designers, suppliers, and factories.

The market opportunity

The Interior Design industry in India is estimated to be a $ 30 bn huge, growing at 10% YoY.

• 80% of this industry is serviced by designers, architects, and contractors. This is the core target segment, where Prolance offers a tech platform via a freemium model, marketplace for materials & services, and white-labelled manufacturing.
• 20% of this industry is serviced by larger/organised players such as Godrej, Spacewood, Design Café, Nobroker, Livspace, etc. For this segment, Prolance offers a tech platform at a price, customised dataset/tech platform, and a marketplace for soft furnishings in Phase II.

What got us interested and excited about this space?

• The Interior Design market is increasingly moving towards a designer-led or contractor-led model (where the contractor brings in a designer). Even a project worth INR 5–10 lakh for a 2/3 BHK demands a designer and a plan today.
• High-end design firms/projects actually outsource most of the drawing conversions, BOM generation, procurement, etc. to the factories. The factories themselves are the targets for Prolance’s solution, as it helps them with minimising costs and errors while leveraging automation.
• For designers who work on lower-end projects and manage the entire process end-to-end, Prolance offers a significant value-add with all the productivity benefits. Further, a marketplace offering a single-point, reliable vendor for materials can significantly improve the easeof working for designers/contractors.

In a market landscape characterised by full stack players like HomeLane & Livspace having proprietary tech, marketplaces or aggregators like Instadeco, and pure-software players like Procore & CoConstruct which were not built keeping in mind the inherent issues of a developing country like India, the opportunity to build a solution that can be become the OS for the industry is an exciting opportunity for us!

Arali Ventures is a pre-seed, seed-stage VC from India, investing in entrepreneurs building enterprise-tech solutions for the world. We help shape their journeys through product-market-fit and beyond and scale the offerings to greater heights.

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