Dheeraj Tiwari and the importance of small things

A fastener has little talent for self-promotion. It does its job somewhere inside a machine, leaving the attention to the machine. Dheeraj Tiwari has built a company around work with a similar disposition: finding components, arranging their manufacture, checking their quality and getting them to the people who need them. The interesting part of his story is how much responsibility can accumulate around something so small.

Tiwari is the co-founder and chief executive of CAPGRID, based in Gurgaon. Its business connects manufacturers with component supply, from development through delivery. That description can sound tidy. The work it contains is less so. Every transfer between a customer, a supplier and a warehouse creates a question about timing, information or ownership. His company has chosen to stand in the middle of those questions.

A consultant learns to follow the parts

His training began in electrical engineering at the National Institute of Technology Kurukshetra, where he studied from 2002 to 2006. He later attended the Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode, completing its management programme in 2011. Engineering and management give him two ways to examine a factory problem: how the thing works, and how the people responsible for it work together.

Between those degrees came roles at Accenture and SAP. Deloitte followed in 2011. His consulting work took him into automotive operations and analytics; his public career record includes recognition for work involving teams in Japan and the United States, and for a Daimler proactive sensing project. Before CAPGRID, he was already working where industrial decisions met data.

There is a particular discipline in that territory. A number needs an explanation. An explanation needs someone who can act on it. Improving a process means persuading several people, often with different responsibilities, to see the same problem. The factory, the purchasing department and the software team can each be correct about their own portion of an unsatisfactory whole.

In 2020, Tiwari co-founded CAPGRID with Himanshu Singh Raghuvanshi, now its chief operating officer. The partnership joined an electrical engineer with a manufacturing engineer whose management education came from XLRI Jamshedpur. Their company began with metal-component sourcing for automotive and industrial manufacturers. The consultant’s view of a system became the founder’s responsibility for running one.

Who takes care of the unglamorous work?

By the November 2021 seed announcement, Tiwari was making a case for paying more attention to direct materials, the supplies that go into a finished product. CAPGRID announced ₹4.1 crore from Anicut Angel Fund, Axilor Ventures and Firstcheque. The intended uses were practical: product development, people and fulfilment. A company promising to handle other people’s complexity first needed enough capacity to handle its own.

The proposition starts with a division of attention. A manufacturer has strategic choices to make about its product. It also has numerous components to obtain. CAPGRID takes on coordination across parts and suppliers, allowing the customer to concentrate elsewhere. For the supplier, the corresponding proposition is a more organized route to demand.

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

Dheeraj Tiwari · December 2022

It is an appealingly plain statement. The supplier should make the part. Yet the transaction surrounding that part can demand a small administrative career: specifications, purchase orders, inspection records, dispatch instructions and invoices. Tiwari’s argument gives that surrounding work an owner. Consolidation is useful only if it leaves the participants with fewer loose ends.

This explains why the value of an inexpensive component cannot be understood entirely from its price. Finding it and moving it require effort too. The purchasing team’s time does not arrive in the same box as the goods, but somebody pays for it. A low-priced item can bring along a surprisingly well-fed entourage of tasks.

The cloud has a loading bay

CAPGRID uses the term cloud manufacturing. Here, the cloud connects a network of manufacturers and their capabilities. The customer needs a component; the system helps identify a suitable production partner and coordinate what follows. Manufacturing still happens on machines. The word cloud does not relieve anyone of the obligation to get a physical object onto a truck.

Quality is part of that connection. CAPGRID describes records that follow a component’s origin and journey, alongside visibility into inventory and goods in transit. Such information has a practical purpose. If a question emerges, the people answering it need to know which part, which production step and which movement they are discussing. A record is useful when it makes the next decision easier.

Warehouses bring another kind of proximity. In August 2022, the company was discussing expansion around India’s manufacturing hubs, with existing locations including Hosur, Rajkot, Jaipur and Faridabad. Putting stock closer to the customer changes the physical distance between a plan and its execution. The last stretch of a supply chain still obeys geography.

Tiwari’s business therefore has to maintain two connected accounts of the same order. One records what is supposed to happen. The other follows what is happening to the goods. A customer can reasonably expect them to agree. The interesting operating problem is keeping them in agreement as an order moves through several organizations.

From the visitor’s badge to the sponsor’s stand

Ahead of Auto Expo 2023, Tiwari recalled attending the event as a student and later as a professional. CAPGRID was now a lead sponsor. It is a compact account of a longer change. The exhibition remained familiar; his position inside it had moved. He had gone from looking at the industry to presenting a business to it.

A visitor can leave with an impression. A founder leaves with conversations to follow up, expectations to meet and an operation that continues after the stand comes down. An event badge is a small object too. Occasionally it carries a fairly complete biography.

That January, CAPGRID announced a $7 million funding round led by Nexus Venture Partners, with existing backers Axilor and Anicut participating, alongside Bain’s Deepak Jain. The stated plans included technology, hiring and more manufacturing capacity through partners. Tiwari’s alma mater later included the funding milestone in its annual report, identifying him as a member of the class of 2011.

The investment attached resources to an already demanding proposition. Connecting many production partners gives a business access to different capabilities. It also gives it more relationships to maintain. Every added supplier must fit into the quality, information and delivery arrangements the customer relies on. Scale has an organizational cost as well as a commercial attraction.

The same suppliers, a different customer

By February 2025, CAPGRID had moved beyond its initial automotive focus into consumer durables. Tiwari described an advantage in serving another industry through the same supplier base. A production capability can have more than one commercial use. The customer changes; some of the underlying manufacturing knowledge remains useful.

The company announced a further $5 million investment round led by Anicut Growth Fund. Nexus and Axilor participated, as did automotive executives Sunjay Kapur and Vivek Vikram Singh. Tiwari said exports had begun, with the US and Germany among the markets of interest. He set a target for international business to contribute 30% of revenue within the following year. That was an ambition stated at the time.

“We have already started global exports.”

Dheeraj Tiwari · February 2025

An export ambition extends the founder’s problem rather than retiring it. A customer farther away still needs a clear specification, dependable quality and an understandable delivery plan. The appeal of a coordinated service has to survive the distance. A new market offers another test of whether the operating model travels as well as the components do.

The public agenda broadened too. CAPGRID announced Tiwari as a scheduled speaker at Hannover Messe in March 2025, on digital transformation and intelligent supply chains in component manufacturing. The subjects were recognizable extensions of his work: supplier capabilities, quality records and visibility across a manufacturing network.

Knowing where the small things are

CAPGRID’s homepage now reports more than 400 active suppliers, over 10,000 distinct parts supplied and a network of 11 fulfilment warehouses. These are company-reported figures, checked in October 2026. They describe different parts of the operation: the people making things, the variety being handled and the places through which those things move.

The variety is revealing. The company lists capabilities spanning machining, fasteners, sheet metal, springs and other component categories. Running that kind of service requires attention to differences. Two items may share a customer without sharing a production process. A consolidated relationship has to preserve the detail that makes each order intelligible.

For Tiwari, the continuing challenge is to make a growing network feel manageable to the person using it. The customer should be able to ask an ordinary question and receive an answer that connects to the physical order. Where is the part? Has it been checked? When will it arrive? Those questions are short because the customer has other work to do.

His story has moved from engineering classrooms and consulting teams to supplier relationships, warehouses and overseas customers. The recurring interest is the connection between separate pieces of a system. CAPGRID puts that interest to a daily test. A machine has many parts; so does the business that gets them there. Somewhere at the end of all that coordination, a fastener can return to its preferred occupation: doing its job without a speech.