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Best Place To Build

How Zetwerk's founders raised a unicorn in 3 years! | Amrit Acharya, BP2B S2 E17

For most of us, MaaS seems like a spelling mistake at first. To us, it means a description of weight or the latest movie at the theatres. MaaS is not any of that!

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Jan 9, 20261h 3mWatch on YouTube ↗

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CHAPTERS

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Chapter summaries

Zetwerk’s manufacturing marketplace: what they build and why customers trust them
Amrit explains Zetwerk’s core offering—Manufacturing as a Service for industrial clients—and how it turns designs into delivered parts through a distributed supplier network. He emphasizes reliability, transparency, and end-to-end project management as the real customer value.
- •Manufacturing as a Service for clients like Siemens/Schneider/GE
- •From design handoff to engineering spec, supplier selection, and project execution
- •Reliability and transparency as the main differentiators
- •Product breadth: wind, solar, transformers, devices/electronics components
- •Hybrid model: growing in-house manufacturing alongside partner plants
How orders get split across suppliers: capability underwriting and AI-assisted matching
They unpack how a single order is distributed across multiple factories and how Zetwerk matches drawings to manufacturing capabilities. Amrit frames Zetwerk’s edge as bringing “new supply” to customers by underwriting capability—not just picking suppliers who’ve built the same part before.
- •Typical order split across ~4 suppliers (range 1–10)
- •30% production in-house; remaining via partner network
- •AI/tech used to break down drawings into required process blocks
- •Underwriting based on machinery/process fit (not prior identical part history)
- •Value creation: unlocking capable but underutilized SMEs as supply
Why Zetwerk was perfectly timed: post-GST supply chains and solving growth (not cost)
Amrit connects Zetwerk’s rise to structural shifts in India after GST, when cross-state sourcing became easier and regional clusters mattered less. He explains how entering during customers’ transition to national supply chains helped Zetwerk position as a growth enabler rather than a cost optimizer.
- •India’s manufacturing base is SME- and cluster-driven (Peenya/Trichy/Jamshedpur examples)
- •GST reduced friction in interstate trade, enabling national supply chains
- •Large enterprises are conservative buyers; trust is the hardest hurdle
- •Zetwerk’s wedge: solve capacity and growth constraints (e.g., backlogs)
- •Growth-problem framing creates new markets vs competing on cost
Pivot: from selling procurement software to using software to run the transactions business
Zetwerk initially raised funding to sell software that filled gaps around supplier discovery and execution tracking beyond SAP. They discovered Indian enterprises were reluctant to buy software, so they pivoted to a transactions-first model where software became the operating system for fulfillment.
- •Original thesis: software for supplier discovery + post-PO execution tracking
- •India enterprise reality: difficult to sell standalone software
- •Customers still wanted outcomes: ‘use your system to find suppliers’
- •Pivot to running manufacturing transactions using in-house software
- •Software became the backbone for scaling physical operations
Software-led manufacturing at scale: visibility, speed, and ‘shrinking time’ everywhere
Amrit details how Zetwerk’s software-first mindset enables real-time visibility across thousands of contracts and suppliers, building trust through proactive communication. He highlights micro-optimizations (like documentation automation) that compound into big reliability gains.
- •Managing ~10,000 contracts with granular progress and quality visibility
- •Proactive delay diagnosis vs months-long opaque supplier chains
- •North Star: reduce hours/days across the manufacturing lifecycle
- •Example: automating complex logistics/invoicing documentation from hours to minutes
- •Sharing internal visibility externally increases customer trust and repeat volume
Why the model is hard to copy: Murphy’s law, operational pain tolerance, and factory love
Responding to ‘what stops competitors,’ Amrit argues the business is replicable in theory but punishing in practice due to operational complexity at scale. He stresses that manufacturing businesses demand long horizons, resilience, and genuine comfort on shop floors.
- •Scale reality: tens of millions of parts; ‘everything that can go wrong, goes wrong’
- •New categories of risk appear (e.g., tariffs) and can destabilize operations
- •Manufacturing takes a decade to meaningfully ‘make a dent’
- •Requires high pain tolerance and on-the-ground factory orientation
- •Amrit’s personal motivation: factories as a ‘happy place’
Amrit’s path to manufacturing: IIT Madras, ITC factories, McKinsey detour, and returning to build
Amrit traces a throughline from childhood building, IIT competitions (Shastra/Junkyard Wars), and early factory roles at ITC to Zetwerk’s current focus. He highlights how campus experiences also built non-technical muscles like fundraising via Saarang sponsorships.
- •Early maker inclination (Lego/windmills) and factory exposure at ITC
- •IITM: Shastra/Junkyard Wars → Bosch internship; love for industrial environments
- •Saarang sponsorship ‘core’ taught fundraising and commercial skills
- •Brief stint at McKinsey after business school; chose not to pursue partner track
- •Clear intent on returning to India to build in manufacturing/engineering
Co-founders’ engineering DNA and building a company run by engineers
Amrit describes how the founding team blends engineering depth with commercial execution, citing competitions like the GE Edison Challenge as formative. He notes Zetwerk’s deliberate preference for engineers—even in sales—because operational excellence drives financial outcomes in this business.
- •Co-founder background and shared engineering orientation (GE Edison Challenge)
- •Engineering excellence as the driver of financial performance
- •Company staffed heavily by engineers; even sales team is engineering-led
- •Breadth across domains: heavy engineering, renewables, electronics, devices
- •Culture built around solving real operational/industrial problems
Operational scale, complexity, and the next evolution: going from horizontal to category depth
They discuss the operational system required to manage thousands of suppliers and projects, then pivot to Zetwerk’s next phase: deeper category expertise to improve manufacturing performance, not just match supply and demand. Amrit uses renewables and capacity cycles to show why depth will matter over time.
- •Operating questions at scale: project manager load, inspection frequency, software stack
- •From horizontal marketplace to targeted category conviction based on demand-supply gaps
- •Solar example: capacity cycles and why product efficiency becomes decisive
- •Strategic rationale: identify categories where demand vastly exceeds supply
- •Future focus: engineering-led improvements inside manufacturing processes
Transformer bet: identifying bottlenecks and solving with deep engineering (not ‘lazy’ sourcing)
Amrit gives a detailed case study on transformers becoming a major bottleneck due to AI/data-center buildouts, creating multi-year backlogs. Zetwerk responds by acquiring capabilities and investing in specific subcomponents (like tanks and cores) to increase supply without sacrificing quality.
- •Transformers shifted from commodity to critical bottleneck; backlogs up to ~4 years
- •Zetwerk acquired a transformer company and won significant US orders
- •Rejecting ‘lazy’ tier-downgrade sourcing that compromises quality
- •Going deep into bottlenecks: transformer tank automation and core supply partnerships
- •Engineering problems span robotics/materials/process redesign to unlock capacity
Building leadership leverage: professional CEOs for categories so founders focus on ‘creative’ work
Amrit explains how introducing experienced industry leaders reduced founder load on day-to-day operational fires, especially after moving to an in-house + partner manufacturing model. This structure allows founders to concentrate on new categories and higher-leverage problem solving while leaders drive continuous improvement.
- •In-house plants made every operational breakdown a founder problem
- •Hiring seasoned leaders (e.g., aerospace manufacturing exec; ex-Foxconn India head)
- •Operational excellence journey: 90% to 99% reliability is a major climb
- •Founders aim to spend time on new-category creation and complex problem solving
- •Kaizen mindset and keeping ‘the lights on’ without losing momentum
Funding journey: choosing hypergrowth, scale economics, and ‘N=1’ investor fit
They shift to why Zetwerk raised significant capital—manufacturing rewards scale via better costs, capital access, and reliability perception. Amrit shares the difficulty of the seed round (no easy category fit like Uber/Airbnb) and why uniqueness later became a strength with top-tier investors.
- •Hypergrowth is a strategic choice; manufacturing economics improve with scale
- •Raised ~ $750M from VCs (Sequoia, Accel, Lightspeed, Khosla, etc.)
- •Customers prefer large, reliable suppliers—scale strengthens the value proposition
- •Early fundraising was hard without clear comps; ‘only a deck’ at seed stage
- •Private markets can reward N=1, first-principles companies without precedents
Future and IPO thinking: balancing perfection, velocity, and long-term public investors
Amrit outlines how the team is thinking about going public and the psychological shift required to accept imperfection at IPO time. He emphasizes the need to educate public investors on why Zetwerk can grow unusually fast for its scale and why the public journey is a multi-decade partnership.
- •Considering IPO timing; learning from founders who have gone public
- •Engineering bias toward perfection vs reality of going public when ‘ready enough’
- •Zetwerk’s rare combination: high velocity growth at meaningful scale
- •Speed + near-perfection execution in distributed manufacturing as the core challenge
- •Public market as a decades-long relationship requiring narrative clarity
Founder relationships and rituals: Srinath’s complementarity, loneliness, and weekly ‘therapy’
The conversation turns personal—Amrit describes his long relationship with co-founder Srinath from IITM through ITC, and how complementarity powers execution. He highlights founder rituals (structured + unstructured weekly time) as an underrated compounding advantage, especially in hard moments.
- •Shared history: hostel life, Singapore exchange, ITC postings, early-career bonding
- •Complementary strengths: Srinath as people/operations magnet; Amrit as systems/paranoia/forward thinking
- •Founder disagreements plus high-trust mind-meld built over years
- •Founder/CEO loneliness and the value of multi-founder ‘therapy group’
- •Company-building rituals: weekly meetings with space for unstructured venting
IIT Madras as a ‘time capsule’: CFI, ambition density, and learning uncomfortable skills
Back on campus, Amrit reflects on how IITM shaped his personal and professional arc through people, diversity, and opportunities like Saarang. He praises the unchanged student ambition and highlights IITM as a place to explore beyond pure engineering into commercialization and relationship-building.
- •CFI’s maker environment as a natural home for engineering-focused students
- •Campus changed physically, but student ambition and curiosity feel constant
- •IITM’s network impact: met co-founder, wife, and lifelong peers
- •Learning fundraising/sponsorship as early training for business-building
- •Encouragement to explore uncomfortable skills alongside technical depth
Advice to students and closing shout-out: depth over ‘cool,’ first-principles doing, Bhubaneswar pride
Amrit advises young founders to avoid superficial entrepreneurship and instead build depth, patience, and intellectual honesty—especially given how long real ventures take. He warns against over-theorizing via content and emphasizes learning by doing and first principles, then closes with a Bhubaneswar shout-out.
- •Entrepreneurship is more mainstream now; families are more supportive than before
- •Risk: starting companies for ‘cool points’ without depth or lived problem exposure
- •Hard-truth timeline: it can take ~10 years to know you’re truly on track
- •Don’t over-intellectualize—execution is where learning happens; ‘first principles’ as the model
- •Wrap-up request: shout-out to Bhubaneswar and underrepresented ecosystems

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