NowPurchase is a Kolkata-based manufacturing materials marketplace that helps metal factories source scrap, alloys, and additives more efficiently. For a lot of foundries, raw-material buying is still opaque, fragmented, and painfully manual. That mess shows up on the shopfloor fast. The new NowPurchase funding round brings in ₹80 Cr, led by Bajaj Finserv, to push deeper into scrap recycling, branded products, and its AI-led SaaS platform MetalCloud. Founded in 2017 by Naman Shah and Aakash Shah, the company is trying to own both sides of the workflow: what factories buy and how they melt it.
What is NowPurchase and how does MetalCloud work?
At the front end, NowPurchase works like a specialized procurement layer for metal manufacturers. Buyers can source raw materials such as metal scrap, alloys, and additives through the platform. The experience is tied to a WhatsApp bot that handles real-time price and stock discovery. That matters because most factories in this category still don’t want another bloated enterprise system. They want quick visibility, faster quotes, and someone who can actually support the order on the ground.
MetalCloud is the software layer sitting inside production. Its core job is to help foundries decide the right charge mix based on inventory, market prices, and available supply, then turn that plan into something usable on the factory floor. The platform captures data through kiosks, IoT hooks, and software inputs. It pushes live production information to computers and WhatsApp, including heat data, sample chemistry, raw-material consumption, breakdown logs, and power use. It also generates a digital melting log sheet and dashboard views for furnace utilization, idle time, liquid metal tap, and specific power consumption.
One of MetalCloud’s more practical modules is the Suggest engine. It gives addition and dilution recommendations during melting and sends spectrometer readings to WhatsApp. It’s designed to reduce the tiny chemistry errors that quietly wreck margins in a foundry. NowPurchase says this module can reach up to 98% accuracy in those recommendations. That’s the kind of detail operators actually care about.
The product is getting broader, too. A newer Defect Bot AI can analyze casting defect images in about 30 seconds. It returns confidence-scored diagnoses, ranks likely root causes, and suggests corrective actions. Put simply, the software is moving from procurement support into a fuller operating stack for foundries: melt planning and shopfloor monitoring. Quality control, too.
Who founded NowPurchase and what has it built?
How the company started
NowPurchase didn’t begin as a narrow foundry-tech company. Naman Shah started it after seeing how little industrial buying had changed compared with consumer commerce, and the early thesis was broader B2B procurement. His cousin Aakash Shah joined as co-founder, and the two validated the idea by visiting factories across Delhi-NCR, Kolkata, and Mumbai before building the company out.
The sharper version of the business came later. By December 2019, NowPurchase had pivoted toward the metal manufacturing market after the founders decided a horizontal model wouldn’t make them important enough to customers. That move gave the company a clearer customer and a more urgent workflow. It also gave it a better shot at becoming part of the supply chain rather than just another seller.
Why Naman Shah and Aakash Shah fit this market
Naman brought startup experience from the US and Singapore, including a stint leading BizEquity’s expansion in Asia. That doesn’t make someone a metallurgist overnight, of course. But it does explain why the company has always leaned hard into software, process design, and category specialization rather than just brokering materials.
Aakash’s fit is more operational. He came in with exposure to mechanical engineering, rural marketing, and B2B consultative selling, and the family’s manufacturing business gave both founders a close-up view of how procurement headaches pile up inside factories. That mix matters. Software ambition on one side, industrial reality on the other.
What NowPurchase has executed so far
This isn’t a beta-stage story. NowPurchase has delivered more than 1.95 lakh tonnes of raw materials to over 200 clients, and it currently operates 6 warehouses and 2 scrap processing centers. After its 2024 raise, the company expanded in Maharashtra with a scrap recycling unit near Pune. It also started micro-centres in Punjab, Gujarat, and Tamil Nadu. By September 2024, Naman Shah said MetalCloud was already being used by more than 100 factories across India.
Its tech bench also got stronger when Ankan Adhikari joined as CTO in January 2021. He had previously founded Pyoopil Education and sold it to upGrad in 2016. That helps explain why NowPurchase’s software side looks more deliberate than what you usually see from industrial marketplaces.
The ₹80 Cr round and how NowPurchase stacks up
Here’s the deal. The latest NowPurchase funding round is ₹80 Cr, or about $8.5 Mn, led by Bajaj Finserv. Existing backers InfoEdge Ventures, Orios Venture Partners, and Real Ispat Group also joined, along with investors and family offices including S Four Capital partner Shikhar Raj and Lloyds Group promoter-director Madhur Gupta. The company has now secured ₹120 Cr in equity overall, and this comes after a $6 Mn mix of equity and debt in 2024 led by InfoEdge Ventures.
Competition is real, but it’s split. Metalbook is a digital metal marketplace with financing and logistics built around supply-chain transactions. ScrapEco focuses on digital scrap buying and selling. Then there are the old-school alternatives: local traders, brokers, dozens of phone calls, manual quote comparisons, and plant teams running procurement from WhatsApp threads and spreadsheets.
NowPurchase isn’t just a commerce layer, and it isn’t just software. It combines physical infrastructure and on-ground service. It also has scrap processing, branded materials, and a foundry-focused SaaS stack that reaches into melt execution and defect analysis. That hybrid model is harder to scale. It’s also probably why investors are still writing checks.
Why does NowPurchase funding matter now?
Because this round changes the company’s shape more than its headline.
The money is earmarked for 3 concrete things: strengthening scrap recycling, expanding the branded products portfolio, and scaling MetalCloud. That means NowPurchase isn’t using fresh capital just to sell more material. It’s trying to deepen control over supply quality, margin structure, and customer stickiness at the same time.
There’s also a geographic signal in the plan. Naman Shah has called Tamil Nadu “the most promising market” for the company right now, and NowPurchase plans to add another scrap processing center there while also setting up end-to-end marketplace operations. It’s also looking to open 2 more facilities in Jharkhand and Tamil Nadu in the next 3 to 6 months. If that build-out lands on schedule, the company gets closer to being a regional operating network rather than a single procurement brand.
Bajaj Finserv leading the round matters, too. Not because a finance brand automatically makes a startup better. But because it suggests institutional belief in a category that sits awkwardly between industrial commerce, recycling infrastructure, and vertical SaaS.
How big is the market NowPurchase is chasing?
Big enough to attract a lot of attention, and messy enough that specialists still have room.
One way to look at it is through the foundry side. Mordor Intelligence pegs India’s foundry market at $28.72 billion in 2026 and projects it to reach $46.72 billion by 2031. On the upstream side, India produced 54.19 MT of crude steel in FY26 between April and July 2025, and the country is expected to reach about 330 MT of steelmaking capacity by 2030. That’s a huge industrial base.
The scrap story is just as important. EY says India consumed about 34.2 million tons of ferrous scrap in 2024, while scrap utilization in crude steel production was only around 23%, below global norms. It also notes that Maharashtra, Punjab, and Tamil Nadu accounted for roughly 35% of India’s scrap consumption in scrap-based steelmaking that year. So the timing makes sense: more scrap demand, more pressure on efficiency, and plenty of room to formalize collection, processing, and plant-level decision-making.
What should you watch after this NowPurchase funding round?
What matters next is whether the company can turn this ₹80 Cr into tighter recycling capacity, a stronger branded-materials business, and a MetalCloud product that becomes part of daily plant operations instead of a nice-to-have dashboard. Watch Tamil Nadu. Watch the new centers in Jharkhand and Tamil Nadu. Watch whether NowPurchase can keep proving that a metal marketplace can also become factory software.
Read how Xovian raised $2M to advance RF satellite systems for reliable and scalable space networks.
FAQ
What is the latest NowPurchase funding round?
NowPurchase has raised ₹80 Cr, or about $8.5 Mn, in a round led by Bajaj Finserv. Existing investors including InfoEdge Ventures, Orios Venture Partners, and Real Ispat Group also participated, along with names such as Shikhar Raj and Madhur Gupta.
How does MetalCloud work for foundries?
MetalCloud is an AI-led factory software stack for metal manufacturers. It helps teams choose charge mixes and captures production and heat data through kiosks and software inputs. It sends updates over WhatsApp and now extends into defect diagnosis and melt execution support.
Who founded NowPurchase?
NowPurchase was founded in 2017 by Naman Shah and Aakash Shah. Naman had earlier startup experience in the US and Singapore, including BizEquity’s Asia expansion, while Aakash brought operating exposure in mechanical engineering, rural marketing, and B2B selling.
Is NowPurchase a SaaS company or a metal marketplace?
It’s both. NowPurchase sells and processes industrial raw materials through its marketplace and physical network, while MetalCloud handles production intelligence inside the plant, which puts the company in the overlap between vertical SaaS, industrial procurement, and scrap recycling.
