Cultivo is a Bengaluru-based blockchain start-up that enables clients and brands to better connect with their customers and vendors. It is the brainchild of Manish Chandrashekar and Mausom Saikia who aim to make it a game-changer in the supply chain arena.

Cultivo first tested its product at IIM-B. Here senior students were creating a supply chain solution for a client and even though it was just a project, Cultivo’s solution was used to track the product.

How Cultivo helps?

In today’s day and age, most companies struggle to convert their paperwork into digital data. In addition, there are inventory tracking solutions, warehouse management systems, and ERP solutions to deal with. Little wonder why companies are looking to digitizing their supply chain businesses. Cultivo addresses these requirements using a mix of finance and technology. Cultivo thus helps in de-risking supply chains, increasing efficiency, and reducing back-office errors and costs. 

The start-up’s product is blockchain-based SaaS. It enables purchase orders and receipts as well as trade-related paperwork to be tracked and simultaneously converted into digital assets. It allows those using blockchain to see the manufacturing, packaging, transportation, quality testing, and shipping of their products to consumers.  

Manish elaborating further on the subject states that ‘supply chains have enormous data, a majority of which is paper-based and unorganized data. Customers have zero understanding of how their products are shipped. This is where Cultivo helps companies. It solves such problems by streamlining their data and visualizing their supply chain in real-time. ‘We enable customers to find important information regarding the journey of their products by scanning the QR code,’ he explains.

Cultivo essentially comes in to solve problems that companies face as in technical challenges such as integrating technology licence software in order to transform businesses digitally.  This becomes essential given that decisions driven by data are the future of supply chains.

The story behind Cultivo?

The story behind the founding of Cultivo is an interesting one. Manish was a graduate at Bengaluru’s Ambedkar Institute of Technology and always dreamt of being an entrepreneur. He joined the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIM-B) as a Research Assistant in 2017 and interned at the Digital Innovation Lab there. Here he worked on blockchain technologies and it led him to innovate and construct a blockchain forum that could track the origin and quality of products in textile, agriculture and pharmaceuticals. It was at IIM-B that he met Mausom Saikia. When Manish discussed his entrepreneurial idea with him, Mausom, who was still an undergraduate computer science student at Jain University was very excited. Both decided to launch Cultivo. Cultivo also includes Ishaan Kohli, a BITS Pilani engineer, who was a research intern at IIT Delhi then. Today the startup launched in 2019 is a ten-member team.