He runs Procol, a sourcing platform reworking how enterprises buy - and he got there by stumbling into the least digitized corner of business software.
Gaurav Baheti - Founder & CEO, Procol
Gaurav Baheti spends his days on a problem most people never think about: how large companies decide what to buy, from whom, and at what price. As founder and CEO of Procol, he leads a team of around 120 building software for intake, RFx, negotiations, supplier management and spend reporting - the plumbing of enterprise purchasing. The pitch is deliberately unglamorous and deliberately simple. Procol calls itself the world's simplest sourcing platform, and simplicity, for Baheti, is a strategy rather than a slogan.
That focus has taken the company across India, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, where it now serves more than 120 enterprises and has cumulatively run billions of dollars of B2B procurement through its system. Buyers rate the product 4.9 out of 5 on G2. The company is backed by a tier-one investor list - Peak XV Surge (the outfit formerly known as Sequoia India), Blume Ventures, Beenext, GMO and a roster of angels - and Baheti himself has landed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
What makes the story unusual is that Baheti did not arrive from inside the procurement world. He trained as a designer and engineer, and before Procol he worked on user experience at Google in New York and as a product designer at TableHero. He knew, in his own telling, almost nothing about how companies buy things when he started. He learned the industry the hard way: by building for a customer who lived in it.
90% of customers are not using any digital solution - they are on phone calls.
The first version of Procol was narrow by design. In 2018, Baheti and Sumit Mendiratta built for a single enterprise that was buying roughly Rs 7 billion of agricultural commodities across 40 locations. That business ran on a tangle of phone calls, emails and WhatsApp threads. Baheti's answer was a reverse-auction mobile app that let buyers and suppliers negotiate faster and see prices in one place.
It worked as a wedge, but Baheti grew wary of the ceiling. Running a vertical marketplace, he concluded, offered little durable advantage. By 2020 he made the call that would define the company: stop selling commodities, start owning the buying. Procol pivoted into a horizontal, end-to-end sourcing platform that could plug into a customer's procurement across many spend categories.
Works on user experience at Google in New York and as a product designer at TableHero, sharpening a bias toward simple, human interfaces.
Co-founds Procol with Sumit Mendiratta at 24, launching an agri-commodity e-auction platform for a large enterprise buyer.
Pivots from a vertical marketplace to a full-stack sourcing and procurement SaaS, betting on owning enterprise demand instead of trading commodities.
Raises Series A funding and pushes into the Middle East and Southeast Asia alongside its Indian base.
Grows past 120 enterprise customers and layers AI into sourcing, intake and negotiations while keeping the simplicity pitch front and center.
Baheti's read on his market is blunt. By his estimate, roughly 90% of Indian enterprises still run procurement manually - phone calls, emailed proposals, spreadsheets stacked side by side - while only about a tenth use legacy systems from the likes of SAP or Oracle. He treats that gap not as a problem to lament but as the entire opportunity. If a company wants to buy, he argues, it wants to buy as efficiently as it can, and almost nobody has given it the tools.
His bigger ambition is to change what procurement is for. The function has long been measured by how much it shaves off a bill. Baheti wants it to earn a seat higher up: a source of strategic advantage, not just savings. That framing shapes the product - mobile-first so that regional suppliers can bid from their phones, fast to deploy so buyers see value in weeks, and sticky by nature once vendor networks are wired in.
He is candid that the commercial model took time to settle. Procol tried transaction-led and spend-under-management pricing before landing on seat-based subscriptions paired with profit-sharing tied to the savings customers actually realize. The sales engine is unusual too: inside-sales led, a motion Baheti says few competitors in his segment have managed to run at scale.
The people who describe Baheti tend to reach for the same words: simple, curious, persistent, open. He approaches hard problems by looking for the plain answer rather than the clever one, a habit that reads clearly in a product built to need almost no training. His stated values run to integrity, openness, curiosity, courage and persistence - the unshowy virtues of someone who chose to spend his twenties on procurement.
There is a nice irony in the arc. A designer who could have stayed in the polished world of consumer software instead walked into the least designed industry in enterprise and made buying software people are willing to open.