Manufacturing tech startup Fabrication Bazar raises $3 million in pre-Series A round

Ben & Gaws Private Limited, which runs the manufacturing tech startup Fabrication Bazar, has raised $3 million in the pre-Series A funding round led by Physis Capital.

The round also saw participation from Japan-based Venture Capital ICMG and existing investor Inflection Point Ventures, a Gurugram-based angel investment firm.

What does Fabrication Bazar do?

Founded by Dwaipayan Dutta, Fabrication Bazar is an asset-light tech-enabled manufacturing platform for industrial steel products catering to 400+ clients across sectors.

With its proprietary manufacturing tech driven process, the startup works with nearly 330+ fabrication vendors across India to improve production efficiency and reduce delivery time by splitting products into multiple parts and processing them simultaneously.

It is also working to digitize its supply chain, providing a platform that centralizes overall management from procurement to quality control and logistics, thereby optimizing the highly unused capacity of 1.5 million+ MSME fabrication vendors in India.

Fabrication Bazar claims to have an extensive vendor network spread across India and an increasing presence in manufacturing hubs in South East Asia like Vietnam. The startup maintains global quality standards while reducing delivery time and cost compared to traditional manufacturers.

Purpose of fundraising

Fabrication Bazar intends to utilize the funds raised, which include part debt, to further enhance the tech platform to support growth, ramp up geographic presence to regions outside India, especially GCC and SE Asia markets, and hire a leadership team.

"The Pre-Series A round is a continued validation of our business model and approach to solving the challenges faced by the steel fabrication industry in India through an asset-light strategy. Our tech-enabled, asset-light manufacturing platform empowers thousands of MSME steel fabricators across India by enhancing their capacity utilization, delivering quality products to blue-chip MNC clients, and providing them access to capital," Dutta said.

"This round helps us to further enhance our tech offerings and build the team to take us to the next level. Given the size and potential of the steel fabrication industry in India and globally, we see significant growth opportunities ahead," Dutta added.

Fabrication Bazar's market presence

Fabrication Bazar claims to have grown across its operations in the last 12 months including the vendor network and client base in India.

The startup has also been onboarded as a qualified vendor by some of the largest companies in GCC, and is establishing a vendor base in Vietnam to cater demand from the SEA region.

With the rising interest from customers both in the domestic and international markets, the order book has grown 3X in the last 12 months. It has been operationally EBITDA positive since inception, the release notes.

The industry landscape

India is the second largest steel producer and consumer in the world with total structural steel market estimated to exceed $20 Billion by 2030, with applications across sectors including Construction, Energy, FMCG, Transmission, Telecom, Buildings, Pharma, Petrochemical, Oil & Gas, Ethanol, Manufacturing etc.

However, current steel fabrication market is highly concentrated with 90%+ fabricators being MSMEs who lack technology, financing and access to large clients leading to massive underutilization of fabrication capacity in India.

As a result, most corporates are dependent on large traditional manufacturers with fixed capacities leading to long lead times and high costs. Fabrication Bazar, through its tech driven platform, bridges the gap between such clients and under-utilized fabricators all over India.