This SaaS start-up is helping brands connect directly with retailers

SaaS start-up O4S aims to track over 5 billion products next year

“Supplytics has helped us bring micro-level visibility, right from our production to warehouses and even retail stores,” says Nikhil Agarwal, managing director, Campus Activewear. Supplytics is one of the core offerings of O4S, a SaaS start-up that helps brands connect directly with retailers and distributors by tracking products throughout the supply chain. 

Co-founded by Divay Kumar and Shreyans Sipani, the Gurugram-based startup has recently raised $2.1 million in Pre-Series A round led by Venture Highway.

“With businesses focusing on deeper engagement with retailers and end-users, obtaining visibility along the supply chain has become more important than ever before. It (O4S) has been successful in winning key contracts from large marquee brands in a short span,” said Samir Sood, Founder, Venture Highway. The tech start-up, so far, has raised $2.5 million, including a seed investment of $400,000 in 2017. 

Product concept 

In today’s fast-paced world, consumers have started to ask tough questions to brands. Retail shoppers are asking why store shelves are empty. Online shoppers are wondering why they can’t track and verify the order bought over the Internet. This disparity of expectation and capability is creating major trust issues between consumers and manufacturers. Given this, brands have also started acknowledging the massive potential in fixing underlying supply chain problems paving way for counterfeiters to easily slip-in.

O4S SaaS’s backbone is product serialisation. “We allocate a digital signature in the form of a UID to each product by integrating the O4S ecosystem with the manufacturing plant's existing infrastructure. The UIDs can be in the form of encrypted QR codes, optical codes or NFC tags. Product UIDs are trackable across the supply chain using a smartphone app, thereby inflicting minimum or no burden of investment in additional infrastructure,” said Kumar, co-founder of O4S. 

The biggest challenge for a manufacturing firm lies in gauging product visibility across the supply chain, especially after it leaves the warehouse. Besides, they have trouble in tracing territorial product diversions and designing tangible and scalable trade/consumer promotions.

Divay Kumar (left) and Shreyans Sipani, founders of O4S

“Before product serialisation, companies were relying on conventional anti-counterfeit models such as holograms, security labels, and seals. A lot of manufacturers are still using these tools and are merely useful as counterfeiters, too, are improving their techniques” he said.

O4S’ core offerings are Supplytics and Original4Sure solutions, which are built on product serialisation and powered by machine learning and internet of things (IoT). Supplytics helps brands connect directly with retailers and distributors by tracking products, while Original4Sure’s key focus is on consumer engagement.

Revenue

O4S is hosted on a cloud infrastructure where businesses pay a monthly fee based on the transactions for various modules. It allows businesses to cater for their distributors, retailers, and customers worldwide. “Our projected revenue for our SaaS for this financial year is $2 million. Being an early player in the Indian market, we’re growing 300 per cent year on year,” Kumar, who is the CEO, said.

The company is aiming to deploy O4S at over 1,000 manufacturing facilities, and over 1 million retail units to track over 5 billion products next year. Currently, O4S focuses on industries such as agriculture, fast-moving consumer goods, pharmaceuticals and personal care products. It has plans to foray into sectors like luxury products and automobile components. 

“We are yet to break even. Our focus is product development and cross-country expansion at this stage,” Kumar said. Fresh funds will be used to strengthen its workforce, accelerate client acquisition and build technology infrastructure.

Expert take

Sushanto Mitra, founder, Lead Angels

04S needs to expand fast

Across India, counterfeiting of well-known brands is an everyday occurence. Multiple solutions have been tried and most have failed as counterfeiters are always a step ahead. At the same time, brands often find it difficult to track how their product is moving through different stages of distribution. resulting in demand-supply mismatches.  O4S has solutions to track both these problems which is indeed creditable. Also noteworthy is how a young company has been able to quickly penetrate large enterprise clients. 

However, given the rapid changes in technology and rise of e-commerce impacting distribution mechanisms, initial successes can be shortlived. The company needs to be careful of the ‘creativity’ of the counterfeiting community, as well as competitors both domestic and overseas who may enter when the market reaches a critical size. 

To be able to reach the next level, the company would need to rapidly expand its operations across India so that it can reach a sizable if not an unassailable market share. It also needs to keep abreast of technology changes.