Blume Ventures, Rainmatter invest $1 mn in commodities platform Procol

New Delhi-based Procol, a procurement platform for the commodity industry, has raised a seed round of $1 million (Rs 6.8 crore at current exchange rate) from early-stage venture capital firm Blume Ventures and Rainmatter Capital, a fintech fund managed by stockbroking firm Zerodha.

The seed money will be used to scale its procurement platform and start deploying other applications around it, the company said in a statement today.

Procol enables food retail and fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies to procure goods by creating live auctions, manage the supply chain by tracking goods and manage rates and supplier payments on a single platform.

Procol, short for Procurement Protocol, was founded by Gaurav Baheti and Sumit Mendiratta. Baheti and Mendiratta worked together at restaurant search and food delivery services firm Zomato and moved on to Google and OYO, respectively, before launching Procol.

“Procol’s auction platform has helped customers such as Bikanervala see dramatic cost benefits,” Baheti said. “We are building on this success by adding related optimisation tools and intelligence to make this a full-stack procurement suite. Sellers love Procol too, for they now have unprecedented transparent access to sell to these large enterprises.” 

Karthik Reddy, managing partner, Blume Ventures, said agri commodity buying in India is a $400 billion large broken market riddled with inefficiencies. “The rapid adoption of Procol’s auction platform by India’s leading agri buyers and sellers is a clear sign that the platform is fulfilling a long-standing market gap and is thus making significant headway in one of the largest markets in India today."

Mumbai-based Blume Ventures was founded in 2010 by Reddy and Sanjay Nath. Some of its investments include primary healthcare services aggregator HealthAssure, deep-tech manufacturing startup Ethereal Machines, software-as-a-service marketplace Skillenza and logistics tech startup Locus.

Bengaluru-based Rainmatter, which was founded by Nithin Kamath in 2015, is a startup incubator that provides workspaces, mentorship, and funding to fintech and tech startups. It typically invests between $100,00 and $1 million. Its portfolio includes options trading platform Sensibull, algorithmic trading platform Streak, and Neotrade Analytics, a startup that provides real-time data feeds to stock market traders.