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

There's a music in every factory-

Yeah

- which is unique. Like, it's how the parts get produced.

Yeah.

We raised the investment and we built the software, but we realized in India it's very hard to sell software. And I think the DNA helped. Honestly, we have scaled a lot. Today, this year we'll do close to $2 billion of, like, revenue. We are a business of producing physical parts. That's the business, but we do it in a very software-led approach. And, uh, the, the- it is Murphy's law at scale. You know, everything that can go wrong, goes wrong. [upbeat music]

Hi, this is Amrit. We are at IIT Madras, my alma mater, and India's top university for people who like to build. We are here to meet some builders, ask them: What are you building? What does it take to build? And what makes IIT Madras the best place to build? [upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to The Best Place to Build podcast. Uh, today I'm sitting with Amrit Acharya. He's the CEO and co-founder of Zetwerk. It's a unicorn in the manufacturing space. Uh, he was also a student here from 2006 to 2010, so we'll get to learn a little bit about what Zetwerk does, and his journey so far. Welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, Amrit. Should mention the time, it's 7:20 in the, in the morning.

Yeah. [chuckles]

Very early. Yeah.

It's 7:20 in the morning, um, and, uh, I'm very grateful. We do shoot very early in the morning because the place we shoot, the Center for Innovation, is an active lab.

Mm.

Uh, and so what happens is that students come, and they drill, and they cut-

Yeah

... and, uh, it's not possible to shoot at that time. Uh, thank you so much. Okay, so Amrit, uh, the Zetwerk, you're of course, four co-founders, so the- together you have created a behemoth in just six years. I have this memory- [chuckles]

[chuckles]

... of walking into your office in, uh, in 2019 maybe.

Yeah.

You were just 20 people, edges of a small office, and now you have- you are this behemoth company which is everywhere. So walk me through what happened, like, how did it, uh, move from there to here?

Yeah, I think you're one of the few people who've actually seen us in our first office.

Mm.

So it was a apartment turned into an office. Um, so we started a company in 2018, um, and, uh, yeah, it's been seven years, roughly, for us. Um, so we... What we do is, we, we offer Manufacturing as a Service, um, to industrial clients. Our customers would be, like, Siemens, Schneider, GE. They want to make some product, uh, they give us the designs, we do fine-tune engineering of that design, convert it into a detailed spec that can be shared with the factory, and then we select, uh, factories who can actually produce that part. And then we will project manage the whole thing to make sure everything is delivered on time, quality is excellent, uh, we offer full transparency, and, uh, essentially, it sums up to reliability. Like, our customers like us because we are reliable, they can give us the order and forget about it. And we have graduated over time. Today, we make wind turbines, we make solar panels, we make transformers, uh, heavy-duty engin- engineering goods. We also make a lot of devices. So we make, like, smart meters, we make, uh, laptop components, we make washing machine components. Um, but, uh... And over the period of time, we realized that, look, we can't have a pure third-party model where we just work with, uh, third-party factories. So today we do roughly one-third of production in-house. We have- operate our own plants, both in India, US, and Europe, and we partner with 5,000 plants across India, Vietnam, and Mexico. Uh, the whole point is, we have built a lot of software so that all of these distributed net- network, which is 5,000 third-party plants and 20 of our own in-house plants, in a way, operate like one plant. Um, so which is just behaving consistently on time, uh, no quality escapes, uh, complete transparency to the customer, and just being, like, a very reliable partner to these large companies.