Cross-border sourcing tech startup Geniemode raises $2.25 mn seed funding

It is an end-to-end e-commerce platform to make global sourcing more efficient, convenient across fragmented, tech-strapped supply chains in furniture, home furnishing, fashion.

Geniemode, the global B2B cross-border sourcing and supply chain technology company, said it recently closed its seed round of $2.25 million led by Info Edge Ventures. Angel investors including Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal, Cred founder Kunal Shah, Prashant Malik, Pankaj Gupta and others also participated in the round.

Amit Sharma and Tanuj Gangwani, the co-founders of Geniemode, have spent the last two decades at e-commerce companies like Limeroad, Fabfurnish and FashionandYou. During their stints, they witnessed several inefficiencies in how sourcing works right from finding the right suppliers to getting quality products delivered in time to buyers. With Geniemode, they are building an end-to-end e-commerce platform to make global sourcing more efficient and convenient across fragmented and tech-strapped supply chains in furniture, home furnishing, hard goods and fashion. 

Within just 5 months of launching the tech platform, Geniemode has seen impressive adoption from global buyers across US, UK, Mexico and India. These buyers are reliably sourcing high-quality products from more than 100 MSME suppliers in India and Bangladesh.

Amit Sharma, co-founder of Geniemode, who has been part of the Indian sourcing industry for almost two decades said, the hesitation of large and small global buyers to source from India is mainly due to lack of access to reliable suppliers and poor transparency. This is related to process and timelines, lack of standardization of quality and unavailability of financing to the supplier.

“Geniemode’s technology platform is set to play a huge part in achieving transparency, providing real-time visibility, standardizing and streamlining the process for both buyers and suppliers,” said Sharma.

Tanuj Gangwani, co-founder of Geniemode said the firm plans to unlock a high-quality supplier base from India and SEA that is available to small and large buyers across the globe and become a one-stop sourcing platform for these buyers. 

“More than 80 per cent of the furniture, hard goods, home soft furnishing and fashion manufacturing is done by MSMEs across clusters in India,” said Gangwani. “We are taking this market globally and helping these suppliers scale.”

Geniemode’s platform allows catalogue creation and discovery. It enables access to the right suppliers and ensures that the entire process, starting from getting the samples developed and approved to shipping, is streamlined. Further, the platform ensures order visibility at each step, adherence to strict global quality checks and managing the end-to-end supply chain for the buyer thus becoming a one-stop-shop for them. For the suppliers, Geniemode takes away all the hassles with respect to generating demand, doing quality control, managing payments and logistics. The company is already on track to scale to 1,000 suppliers from India and South East Asia doing over $50 million in annualized topline in the next 6 to 12 months.

“Geniemode is solving this challenge of digitizing Indian exports by connecting quality suppliers with global buyers and managing end-to-end supply chain visibility,” said  Kitty Agarwal, Partner at Info Edge Ventures.