Pando raises INR 64 Crores Series A from Chiratae Ventures and Next47, with Nexus Venture Partners participating
Nexus just participated in the Series A round of its portfolio company Pando. We had seeded Pando in early 2018, backing Nitin Jayakrishnan and Abhijeet Manohar as they set about to change the way Indian enterprises met their freight procurement requirements. Nitin had done work, while in college, looking at the space and had discovered there were many inefficiencies that could be addressed by the use of technology and data science/machine learning. They came to Nexus after having built a solution and proven their hypothesis through a deployment at Philips. We felt that Nitin and Abhijeet complemented each other very well — with Nitin bringing a very solid understanding of market needs, a product-first thinking, and a consultative sales approach needed for the Indian market; along with Abhijeet having a proven ability to translate market requirements into scalable, reliable products and building effective engineering teams. Apart from their inherent capabilities, they showed incredible openness during diligence, having us speak not only to their existing client, but also to customers in the pipeline as well as potential clients that had said no to them. It was amazing to see that even clients that had passed, raved about their experience during the interactions and how Pando just “got” the Indian needs, and if it were not for global mandates, or budget restrictions, or some other reason not directly related to Pando’s value proposition, they would have loved to work with the team and deploy the product. Indian enterprises are demanding clients in nature, and such positive feedback combined with comfort with the team led us to invest $2M to seed Pando.
Over the last two years since our investment, the company has come a long way. From Philips as the initial client, we now have a dozen of India’s largest FMCG, white goods and industrial businesses as clients, and the product has expanded from a manual freight procurement platform for contracted supply to supporting fully automated contract procurement, market-based spot-procurement, freight planning, digital payments with full reconciliation, and spend optimization. Working with clients across various industries and various freight routes has also given Pando a unique perspective on freight procurement best practices and supply patterns; and clients that have seen significant spend reduction are now asking the company to take on outsourced freight procurement services. The team has also expanded to over 70, with Ashok Vasan, a former VP at Computer Associates and earlier at i2 Technologies, joining to lead the sales efforts, and many experienced executives from McKinsey, Miebach and Unilever coming on board to drive customer success and identify new use cases.
As Pando has added new solution capabilities, our clients are also asking the company to help address similar requirements in other markets, particularly in South East Asia, the Middle East and parts of Europe where the freight supply partners and procurement challenges are similar to India. The company sees a very large opportunity in India, and the domestic market remains the primary focus, but we expect that over the next 12–18 months Pando will work closely with clients to establish a presence in these external markets.
Given the growth potential in India and global markets, Pando decided to raise growth capital, and Chiratae and Next47 joined us in this round. We have seen immediate impact from the new partners, with Chiratae helping the company start a pilot at one of India’s largest FMCG companies that is now turning into a systemwide deployment, and Next47 making introductions within Siemens and to other European enterprises. We are looking forward to working with the new partners to accelerate Pando’s growth and build a global market leader in the transportation management space.
Sandeep Singhal, Nexus Venture Partners
For more insights from the Nexus team, click here.
