Mandrel

/ Startups / By

Founders: Arjun Aggarwal
Founding: 2023
Mission: The operations data platform for consumer brands
Employees: 3 & 60% Local
Workplace: Remote
Stage & Capital Raised: Pre-Seed & <$5M raised
Investors: Asymmetric Capital, Construct, LUX Capital
Key Customers: Coming Soon!
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$50M
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!

Mandrel is building “operations data software” for consumer brands and physical goods businesses. This Seed stage team is racing to build a platform that will allow commerce businesses to view fulfillment performance and costs in real time in order to help them scale faster and more profitably. Like Klaviyo or Segment, but for operations. Or DataDog for operations infrastructure.

Mandrel was founded in 2023 by Arjun Aggarwal, an experienced operator from Desktop Metal (DM). He spent 5+ years at the company leading Product through some of their key initial launches while also managing key supply chain & manufacturing relationships. He also oversaw investor relations and corporate development when they went public on the NYSE. Desktop Metal is an original equipment manufacturer who designs, manufactures, and sells 3D printers across a variety of industrial use cases. In short, they build physical products and have to manage their product & operations processes closely as a hardware company

Arjun & his team worked really closely with Desktop Metal’s operations team on inventory planning and purchasing decisions as the company grew. From a product perspective, he had to understand the interplay between shipping new products versus selling through the inventory already on hand for pricing decisions and margin forecasting. All of this data and the decision making decisions required rigorous analysis across the company.

Desktop Metal worked with a third party fulfillment provider and every quarter it was interesting to see the delta in costs. They weren’t shipping 100ks of products per year, but there was always a variance between the output and their initial forecast. Getting accurate data and integrating it into their ERP system was a consistent challenge. 

Working for a hardware company helped Arjun understand what put the “hard” in hardware – inventory, fulfillment, and supply chain visibility. He wanted to build something that could help Desktop Metal and other commerce businesses run better. 

Looking out over the past decade of software for physical goods businesses, most of the products and investment dollars have been focused on the demand side of the P&L – advertising or marketing tech that leverages data to drive demand. One could argue much of that problem area has been tackled.

You know this too but it’s worth reiterating how much global e-commerce has grown over the past decade. $1.3T in 2014 global e-commerce sales is approaching $6T+ in 2024 (src). Not to mention all the supply chain disruption that Covid brought us. Arjun wrote a helpful blog post here that helps highlight the post pandemic shift.

Mandrel believes that the next decade will be focused on “doing more with less” and helping close the gap between top line growth and bottom line efficiency, with a renewed focus on sustainable growth. And the truth is that a lot of companies don’t really know where to start operationally. $100M consumer brands are historically founded by product, design, or customer experts and can be lighter on operational expertise.

There is a big opportunity to help companies optimize their operations and provide tools to help them understand how to make better decisions. Physical goods businesses and consumer brands with high velocity around shipping and fulfillment serve as the best initial use case. Larger brands may have the resources to build out a data team, set up a data warehouse, and develop integrations into data sources and pipelines into tools like Tableau. But it’s expensive, takes time, and can’t always be done at a smaller scale. Mandrel is building the platform that productizes this whole effort, an operations data platform for consumer brands “out of the box”.

Mandrel’s initial roadmap is focused on building out integrations and standardizing data across many different schema into a single, clean data model to make this operations platform a reality. Mandrel will leverage partners in fulfillment, followed by the rest of the supply chain – design, manufacturing, quality, logistics, support, and returns. Examples include warehouse management tools like ShipHero, Extensiv, Deposco & Logiwa and order source data from Shopify and Amazon. Second, they’ll help customers make use of their data in a way that an experienced COO might by building data applications on top of the data platform and eventually developing an external API for 3rd parties and brands to develop their own custom analyses, applications, and workflows.

Target customers will be mid market brands with eight figures to nine figures in revenue with a roadmap to eventually capture enterprise scale use cases with the operational scale & complexity to match. 

Earlier this year, Mandrel closed a pre-seed round with meaningful institutional support from Boston based Asymmetric Ventures, Lux Capital, and Construct Capital. The team is currently remote & building in the Boston area with the hopes of bringing on a couple more foundational team members in the next couple quarters. In addition to the core team, they’re building a group of advisors from commerce software companies (e.g. Klaviyo), consumer brands (e.g. Caraway), and fulfillment businesses (e.g. Outerspace). 

Operators to Know:

Key Roles To Be Hired:

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

  • What are the key milestones over the next 6 months? 
  • Who are the key buyers for Mandrel’s product?
  • What is the long term vision for the company?
  • What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2024?

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Mandrel you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more discipline to the operational layer of commerce. All responsible growth practitioners applaud your efforts. See you around!

Subscribe
Subscribe