Nitin Jayakrishnan: Solving the logistics puzzle for big enterprises

Image: Selvaprakash Lakshmanan for Forbes India

Nitin Jayakrishnan | 26
Founder and CEO, PandoCorp

We realised early on that the supply chain and logistics of the large enterprises of the world were not getting enough attention,” says Nitin Jayakrishnan, founder of PandoCorp. “In the next 20 years, businesses will change dramatically, and supply chain software from the last era won’t do.” 

From securing raw materials, to getting them to their hundreds of factories globally, to moving finished goods to their warehouses to bringing them to cities worldwide and to retail stores and online stores, the transportation, warehousing and inventory management involves a complex, global flow of data and decision making. Pando’s software manages it all.

Its customers include Nestlé, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Siemens, Danaher and the Tata group. “They trust us… their supply chain runs on our technology product,” says Jayakrishnan.

Even before Covid, he adds, “customers wanted just in time”. The pandemic has only enhanced that trend alongside the rise in ecommerce, making Pando’s software that much more relevant. It works off the cloud and customers pay on a subscription model, helping them save 10-15 percent of their supply chain costs.

“Nitin’s passion to solve customer problems and agility to evolve quickly are his biggest strengths. Nitin has such a strong bias towards action that it makes his speed of execution faster than others,” says Puneet Kumar, a VP at investment firm Steadview Capital.

Pando has raised about $13 million in funding. Revenue has been growing between three and four times every year for the last three years, Jayakrishnan says. Gross margins are 90 percent and are being ploughed back into building the team in the US, Europe, India and Southeast Asia.

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 “Nitin has built and grown a talented team that is laser-focussed on developing an amazing product that has not only won in the Indian market, but is also primed to become a real force internationally,” says Lak Ananth, CEO and managing partner at Next47, a US-based venture capital firm.