B2B cloud manufacturing Frigate secures $1.5M USD in seed round

By OEM Update Editorial July 4, 2023 7:12 pm IST

Manufacturing startup Frigate has successfully raised their Seed round of $1.5M Led by Arali Ventures with participation from Capital-A, Java Capital, and other strategic angel investors.

With the new round of funds, Frigate® will expand its digital manufacturing ecosystem to cater to its global customer base.

Frigate, established in 2021 by Dr. Tamizhinian Vasanthan, Karthikeyan Prakash, Chandrasekar C, and Iniyavan Vasanthan, is a pioneering B2B cloud manufacturing startup. Their innovative platform provides a wide range of manufacturing services to medium and large-scale companies worldwide. Frigate focuses on serving the New Energy & Power, Infrastructure, EV sectors, and Automotive industries, specializing in Heavy Fabrication, Sheet metal, Castings, Forgings, and Injection molding.

Dr.Tamizhinian Vasanthan, Founder & CEO stated that on the demand side, Frigate® provides Manufacturing-as-a-Service to global customers, offering globally competitive pricing, better lead time, and Best in class manufacturing with quality. Our customers consider us as an extended supply chain partner from New Product Development to Mass production. Frigate is helping overseas customers who are looking at China +1 policy to set up a manufacturing base in India. 

Karthikeyan Prakash, Co-Founder & CPO stated that through our proprietary AI enabled tech platform, we enable demand-supply matching, standardization showcasing our partners’ capacity, capability, and availability and complete transparency from sales to order fulfilment. This approach has the potential to drive job creation and economic growth while making India a manufacturing superpower.

On the supply side, Frigate® has partnered with more than 200 manufacturing partners, known as Frigaters located in Tier 2 cities such as Coimbatore, Trichy, Hosur, Jamnagar, Ludhiana, Kolhapur and Kolar. By leveraging technology in utilizing their spare capacity, Frigate helps these partners by increasing their revenue from customers globally.

Arun Raghavan, Managing partner at Arali Ventures said, “The manufacturing sector from India has significant tailwinds driving it forward. The B2B manufacturing business is poised like IT services was in the late 90s. OEMs, especially in new age industries, across the globe are looking for long term partners who will help them build out their vendor development, contract manufacturing partners and supply chain capabilities; the Frigate team with its all round manufacturing, new product development and operations management capabilities is best suited to execute on this going forward.”

Vinod Shankar, Partner and co-founder at Java Capital says “We believe the AWS moment for manufacturing companies has come. Similar to how the IT infrastructure moved to the cloud, we expect manufacturing to follow. Also coupled with the rapid digitisation of the B2B supply chain in India and with the China + 1 strategy will only add to the adoption curve. Frigate founders have built a strong team that is ready to go, which gives us a deep conviction in the both founders and the market. We are playing on a large market + young founders’ thesis from our fund playbook”

We firmly believe that Frigate is poised to become the future of manufacturing in the world,” said Ankit Kedia, Founder at Capital-A. “This investment signifies our confidence in the transformative capabilities of cloud-based manufacturing and its potential to reshape the industry landscape globally. Frigate’s innovative approach will enable manufacturers to thrive in an increasingly dynamic and interconnected world, unlocking untapped potential and opening doors to unparalleled growth opportunities.”

Frigate® is strengthening its team across India and globally to support business development and Supply Chain Management, Technology and Finance. This is Frigate’s second round of funding. Earlier the company had raised its pre-seed round of $185,000 through strategic angel investors and founders in April 2022.