CAPGRID and the hidden life of a small part

A fastener is an unpromising place to look for a business idea. It is small, familiar and unlikely to feature in the launch film for a new car. Yet somewhere between its drawing and its arrival at a factory, it acquires an entourage: a buyer, a supplier, an inspector, a transporter, an invoice. The part may be inexpensive. Getting everyone to agree about the part can be another matter.

CAPGRID has chosen that crowded interval as its territory. Based in Gurgaon, the company brings together precision-component sourcing, partner manufacturing, quality governance and fulfilment. Its pitch is particularly interesting for the less complex parts that occupy purchasing departments without defining the finished product. A component can be ordinary in engineering terms and troublesome in organizational terms. The factory still needs it on Tuesday.

The price tag misses the paperwork

Dheeraj Kumar Tiwari and Himanshu Singh Raghuvanshi founded CAPGRID in 2020 after working in management consulting. They had seen manufacturers manage direct-material sourcing through lengthy, manual processes. Their backgrounds joined electrical engineering and manufacturing engineering with management education. The opportunity they pursued was practical: give the customer fewer relationships to administer, while giving factories a more organized route to demand.

Consider the difference between selecting a supplier and receiving a usable component. Selection answers who might make it. Production introduces schedules and specifications. Inspection introduces records. Delivery introduces another timetable. CAPGRID’s design-to-deliver model follows those successive jobs. Its software provides a control-tower view, but the proposition reaches beyond the screen into the handling of actual orders and actual stock.

“Also, vendors should be focusing on their core, that is manufacturing.”

Dheeraj Tiwari · December 2022 interview

That division of labour explains where CAPGRID fits. A purchasing-software vendor helps people conduct a process; a supplier directory helps them find candidates. CAPGRID offers to coordinate the component’s journey. Buyers can also retain their existing suppliers or consider manufacturing networks such as Zetwerk. The relevant comparison is responsibility: which tasks remain with the buyer, and which does the provider undertake?

A factory network with a front door

The company calls its approach cloud manufacturing. Here, the cloud connects production capabilities spread across partner factories. In the January 2023 funding announcement, CAPGRID said it had mapped more than 30,000 suppliers across 15 countries. It also reported a much smaller working network of over 300 partners. A capability profile and a factory making your order are different things. Confusing them makes a network look more operational than it is.

The current homepage reports more than 400 active suppliers, over 10,000 unique parts and 25-plus customers. Those are company figures. The combination is revealing: many parts can sit behind relatively few customer relationships. Each relationship is therefore an opportunity to take on a substantial bundle of procurement work, rather than merely win a single transaction.

CAPGRID Go provides a public front door to that system, with component selection and routes into development, engineering and alternate sourcing. The broader service includes spare-parts requirements, import localization and value engineering. For a buyer, the attraction is continuity: a requirement can move from identifying a manufacturing capability to arranging the checks and deliveries needed to put it into use.

The commercial model is B2B component supply supported by coordinated manufacturing services. Its expertise combines engineering, supplier assessment, procurement, quality and logistics. Warehouses near customers are part of the proposition. A component waiting close to a plant can answer an urgent requirement differently from one still crossing the country. That proximity also means the business must organize physical inventory, alongside information.

The same machines, a new customer

The financing followed the operational ambition. CAPGRID announced ₹4.1 crore in seed capital in November 2021, followed by a $7 million Series A led by Nexus Venture Partners in January 2023. That round was intended for technology, people and manufacturing capacity through partners. These amounts show what investors supplied to build the business; they do not measure what a customer pays to use it.

A further $5 million round, announced in February 2025, was led by Anicut Growth Fund. Existing investors participated, alongside automotive executives Sunjay Kapur and Vivek Vikram Singh. By then CAPGRID had expanded from automotive into consumer durables. Tiwari described the move as a way to diversify risk while serving another industry through the same suppliers. The network had acquired another commercial use.

That is the strategic detail worth pausing over. A supplier’s relevant asset is a manufacturing capability, which can serve more than one market. A customer’s relevant need is a component. CAPGRID occupies the space where those two descriptions meet. In the same February announcement, Tiwari said exports had begun, with the US and Germany among markets of interest. International expansion extends the coordination problem across distance.

Count the touches

There is a lesson here that does not require buying anything. Pick a component and follow it. Count the requests, approvals, checks, invoices and handoffs. Ask who owns each delay. Compare the saving on its quoted price with the effort required to keep it moving. CAPGRID’s model suggests that the more revealing unit of analysis may be the journey of the part, rather than the part alone.

Consolidation still needs a suitable setting. As an operational inference, components requiring difficult supplier qualification offer less freedom to move production; savings also have to justify coordination and stockholding costs. Quality records must be dependable enough to act on. The appeal of CAPGRID rests on making these ordinary obligations manageable. At the end of the journey, the fastener can finally get back to the modest business of holding something together.