Why did we invest in Omnivio?

Omnivio offers a cloud-based plug-and-play control tower that provides clients with an end-to-end view of their entire supply chain and helps in managing and automating supply chain workflow operations.

Omnivio raised $1.02 million in their seed round, which saw participation from Caret Capital, Blume Ventures, Eximius Ventures, SuniconVenture Fund, Misfits, and several angel syndicates and individual investors from India, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.

The below factors compelled us to invest in Omnivio:

1) Rise of Omni channel and Opaque Supply Chains

Between facilitating trade of offerings across the country and beyond, employing over 22 million people, and contributing roughly 14% to the national GDP, the logistics sector is the backbone of the Indian economy. For a country as expansive as India, the logistics industry needs to have a high degree of accessibility across widely differing land masses to provide value to operators.

As India gets poised to become the world’s third-largest consumer market by 2027, the demand for new products is bound to increase manifold. To cater to this ever-increasing user base, D2C companies and large marketplaces, in particular, have needed to adopt omnichannel supply chains that are incredibly cumbersome to manage for any party. This complexity is only added to by the fact that while the available logistics network is indeed extensive, it is rather fragmented and opaque which puts consumer-facing companies specifically in a position of peril due to the lack of adequate visibility. As per a report from Geodis, only 44% of companies have transversal visibility between suppliers and clients. In an industry that is hinged on fine margins, a cluttered and opaque supply chain can end up compromising any company’s competitiveness.

While inadequacy in infrastructure is the biggest hindrance, a key reason for the fragmentation is the predominance of the unorganized segment in the industry. Around 99% of the logistics is comprised of the unorganized sector which includes small operators such as owners of less than five trucks, brokers or transport companies’ affiliates, small-scale warehouse owners, customs brokers, and freight forwarders, among others. Alongside this, integral parts of the supply chain such as order management systems, warehouse management systems, and delivery aggregation systems, all involve different data repositories which makes reconciliation and syncing a major challenge.

Further, beyond this fragmentation, the manner of data storage is still extremely rudimentary across the industry. Instead of relying on more modular data storehouses, quite a few unorganized operators resort to resources that need a high degree of manual intervention (WhatsApp snapshots, pen & paper, excel) to keep a tally of relevant information.

Therefore, while the Indian logistics network is indeed quite large, it is also immensely fragmented and opaque, especially in managing omnichannel operations. This presents a major hurdle to companies as complete oversight is important to optimize operations and better margins. Therefore, there is a pressing need for solutions that help companies have complete visibility and control over their supply chains.

2) Need for Tech-led Disruptions

Due to the above-mentioned problem statement, companies, particularly large customer-facing enterprises, face a dearth of data that hinders their visibility comprising the quality of service. With the rise of quick commerce, the need for fast and quality service is rising, while companies need to ensure that their margins are not compromised. As per a survey from Capgemini, disruption in the supply chain is perceived by 89% of organizations as the top risk for business growth. To avoid this situation, we see quite a few companies investing heavily with 43% of executives planning to increase investments in their supply chain over the next year and beyond. Facilitating a digital transformation is one of the biggest avenues for this investment.

As investment in solutions increases, companies across the world are looking for tools that can be integrated across the entire value chain to provide a more comprehensive degree of visibility. Quite a few are looking to build supply chain control towers to solve this issue. These are systems that provide end-to-end visibility across the supply chain by leveraging advanced technologies, such as AI with machine learning, to help break down data silos, reduce or eliminate manual processes, and get real-time actionable insights. To make visibility more accessible, such solutions usually involve a connected, personalized dashboard of data, key business metrics, and events across the supply chain. This is specifically useful in managing omnichannel supply chains.

With this enhanced real-time end-to-end visibility, predictive and prescription decision support, and collaborative information sharing that this technology allows, businesses can make better decisions that boost their profitability.

However, while such control towers are an effective solution to opaque supply chains, they are notoriously difficult to construct and implement. Due to the highly siloed and disjointed streams of data that must be integrated into them, building control towers is a challenging operation for even the largest of enterprises. Therefore, there is a whitespace for solutions that make such solutions more accessible to companies without compromising on effectiveness.

3) Well-experienced Team

Building such a solution not only requires a team that is very close to the problem statement but also one that is experienced enough to build a product that is intuitive and seamless to use. This is exactly what Sidhartha Bhimania and Anuj Jain have in spades.

Sidhartha is an IIT Delhi alumnus who completed his PhD from Rice University in 2005. During his over a decade-long career which includes a 7-year stint as a founder of specialty chemicals, a tenure at Snapdeal where he served as AVP & Head First Mile Supply Chain, and an association with Landmark Group where he served as Head — Omnichannel Operations, Sidhartha has built considerable expertise managing supply chains and omni-commerce roles.

Anuj, on the other hand, is an IIT Roorkee alumnus who completed his MBA from IIM Lucknow. With a career spanning over a decade as well, his notable associations include a stint as Director at Snapdeal and a tenure as Vice President at Pickrr. Thus, he has extensive experience not only working in leadership positions at eminent companies but also facilitating exponential growth and captivating customers.

As a team, Sidhartha and Anuj possess a high degree of relevant experience that enables them to attain a high degree of precision in their actions.

4) An Impeccably Precise Product

To solve the above-described problem statement, Omnivio is building a comprehensive platform that pulls in data from these various platforms and provides clients with a consolidated dashboard that helps them synchronize and optimize their activities across the entire supply chain. This DIY Dashboard can be completely customized by companies to attain the view that benefits them the most.

To increase its user base and make user adoption as seamless as possible, Omnivio offers a cloud-based plug-and-play fulfillment & logistics network that is easy to integrate with the supply chain.

To elaborate, Omnivio uses API integrations across the entire e-commerce and omni-tech stack which includes products such as order management systems, warehouse management systems, delivery aggregation systems, inventory systems, and customer service systems. This makes Omnivio a single system of record for supply chain data for any company and eradicates the issues caused by the highly fragmented nature of the industry. Thus, Omnivio enables omnichannel solutions to work seamlessly by effectively managing coordination between stores, warehouses, and last-mile delivery solutions.

Further, going forward, Omnivio will not only be able to tell clients what went wrong but what were the specific causes that led to these incidences. The platform will also allow companies to create automated strategies that can solve the same, or respond manually, if needed.

Finally, the output from this single dashboard and visualization platform is then automatically shared across relevant stakeholders within the company’s system via appropriate communication channels like Slack, Whatsapp, e-mails, etc.

Therefore, Omnivio aims to be the single data layer, on top of all Supply Chain SaaS and Services providers.

Conclusion

India is home to an extensive logistics network that powers numerous companies across the country. However, as extensive as this network is, it is also fraught with a multitude of problems like fragmentation and the predominance of legacy tech that hinders any company’s ability to attain visibility over their supply chain which severely affects their margins, especially when they increase distribution channels. Thus, while there is indeed a large logistics industry, it is riddled with fragmentation and opacity.

Enabling a digital transformation in supply chains is a chief problem statement for quite a few companies. As more companies are looking to invest heavily in their supply chains, digitization is at the top of the agenda. To facilitate this, quite a few are looking at building control towers that provide an end-to-end view of the supply chain and make the entire process more effective. However, building such control towers is an arduous task for most companies due to their complexity, which acts as a major hindrance. However, making these control towers more accessible and intelligent is a white space.

Omnivio has the perfect team to build a product that solves this problem statement. Both Sidhartha and Anuj are immensely experienced folks that not only comprehend the problem statement with precision but also possess the necessary know-how to build a product that resolves it.

The company is building a platform that can pull in data from a multitude of sources and display it all on a single dashboard. Omnivio integrates seamlessly with multiple data points to provide the most comprehensive view possible of the entire supply chain. This makes it a single system of record for supply chain data for any company accessing it.

We are very proud of being a part of Omnivio’s journey and wish them all the best!