Nexprt raises $5 mn in seed round from Sequoia Capital India and Lightspeed

Early backers Titan Capital and other notable angel investors also participated; proceeds to be used to scale existing business and launch new verticals in manufacturing domain

B2B manufacturing and commerce startup Nexprt has raised $5 million in seed funding from Sequoia Capital India and Lightspeed. The round also saw participation from early backers, Titan Capital and other notable angel investors. The company plans to use the proceeds to scale the existing business and launch new business verticals in the manufacturing domain.

Founded by Harsha Vardhan Kalipatnapu, Manav Garg, and Kunal Jain in 2020, Nexprt are building a full-stack vertical commerce business to standardise manufacturing. It is creating category-specific solutions, beginning with the home décor category and expanding to other business verticals. The team at Nexprt over the past year has built a sales team across multiple continents to open up demand channels and has also deeply invested in manufacturing-related innovations and processes, enabling the team to execute at scale in India, what was only possible in China and SouthEast Asia till now.

“B2B trade is a mature and well-understood industry. To build a high quality business, one needs to understand category level nuances as each category is vast, with its own set of problems and bottlenecks - they may be working capital related. It is key to identify and solve for those specifically so that they can be the differentiators in the long term,” said Harsha Vardhan Kalipatnapu, co-founder, Nexprt.

While in 2021, the company was focused on identifying growth levers, the focus in 2022 is to rapidly grow in the home decor category.

“Building a scalable playbook was key. Process and technology innovation, data-backed catalog intelligence, and design and product teams spread across the globe have enabled us to build a very deep process and innovation led industry moat that has seen great customer love. Our customers have quickly moved a significant chunk of their business to Nexprt both, from different vendors and countries, which gives us confidence that we are on the right track,” said Manav Garg, co-founder, Nexprt

With a manufacturing facility in Moradabad and another facility opening in Jodhpur in January 2022, Nexprt is on-track to building a one-stop decor solution in India for global clients, a value proposition that manufacturers haven’t been able to provide. The team is eyeing a 5x growth in the next few months in the decor business once these facilities are up and running.

Vaibhav Agrawal, Partner at Lightspeed said, “We met the Nexprt team and felt they were special founders we just had to be in business with, even before they had a customer or a product! Their focus from the get-go on both quality & leveraging technology to delight customers has been incredible. The South East Asia — US/EU corridor has many gigantic opportunities across payments, logistics, commerce and we are excited to work closely with Nexprt to shape the future”

“Digitisation of the exports ecosystem in India is a massive opportunity. As the industry develops, we believe a larger share of global exports in several categories will move to this region. When we met the Nexprt team, we were very impressed by the nuanced understanding and insights they had in this space, making them well-positioned to capture what we believe is going to be a huge trend in the next decade, and Sequoia Capital India is excited to partner with them right at the outset of this journey,” Shraeyansh Thakur, Principal, Sequoia India said.