04S On a Mission To Democratize Use Of Advanced Tech The SaaS platform ensures the lowest investment of time and money with a high return on investment

O4S, a SaaS startup, is on a mission to disrupt and democratize the use of advanced tech by integrating the Software as a Service (SaaS) platform. It ensures the lowest investment of time and money with a high return on investment.

"O4S was created with a vision to integrate advanced technologies such as the Internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) for practical applications in supply chain management. The manufacturing industry has a fairly complex supply chain with millions of products moving through various nodes and parties every single day. Moreover, the industry experiences a high dependency on manual operations. Thus, making automation, digitization and transparency in the supply chain a need of the hour to optimize and bring high levels of efficiency," said Divay Kumar, CEO and co-founder O4S.
"Post inception in 2017, we commercialized the product in early 2019 after testing through our minimum viable product with the industry's leading enterprises through small pilots. Pilots were thoroughly supervised to do multiple pivots ensuring smoother onboarding and quicker results. Since O4S is the first mover in this space, we have a huge responsibility to set the right expectations and build trackable KRAs for this genre," he added.

The company believes technology advancements can be democratized and commercialized at low cost to hundreds of enterprises. "We invest highly in research and development of the new forms of IoT and other deep tech applications that can adapt across industries such as FMCG, agri inputs and consumer durables and bring out the value that was theoretically envisioned."

So far, the company has raised over $10 million from external institutions and HNIs across three investment rounds. "Our recent investment was Series A stage of $6 miillion led by a leading US-based fund, Think Investments. Venture Highway, an early-stage venture capital has been our long-term investor and has backed us since our seed investment round in 2017."

Talking about his distribution, he said, "Our primary channel of distribution has been our internal sales team. We have recently ventured into the O4S partner program, aimed to build cohesive partnerships with system integrators and global technology consulting firms."

COVID-19 has been a game-changer for the sector. "Automation and digitization in the supply chain have become a priority for not just the industry leaders but hundreds of MSMEs. O4S has been a fast mover, to build its place in the industry with several giants such as Infosys, Wipro, Accenture, and other large system integrators. Choosing what and when to build has been one of the major challenges for all teams. As per various market reports, the global supply chain SaaS market is expected to grow to over $20 billion by 2025 with a CAGR of over 20 per cent. We are witnessing high traction and demand and looking to invest significantly in technology to be able to scale up as per the demand. For market expansions, delivery and supporting global customer base we would be looking at the next investment round, i.e. Series B in 2022," he said, talking about the challenges and demands of the market.

The platform is aggressively looking to expand across new geographies such as Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand, among others. "These countries hold tremendous potential for digitized and automated products. Further, we're also looking to incorporate an office in the USA to partner with companies for compliance traceability across North and South America."