HOW SMALL FACTORIES ARE POWERING ZETWERK

Despite the funding winter, the unicorn has been able to maintain its valuation

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Bengaluru: Spacenex Aero Pvt. Ltd’s name was inspired by SpaceX—the Elon Musk-founded company that designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft. But unlike SpaceX, Spacenex isn’t widely known. It is a mid-sized contract manufacturing company in Bengaluru, which till two years back, could mostly make and test aerospace and defence components. Parts of cockpits; thermal equipment; rocket launchers; night vision lenses; heat sinks, and night vision cameras, among others.

The manufacturer found it challenging to expand beyond aerospace and defence. So, in 2021, it decided to become part of Zetwerk Manufacturing Businesses Pvt. Ltd’s growing network of contract manufacturers.

Zetwerk, which started in 2018, is now a unicorn, or a company with a valuation of over a billion dollars. It is not the usual tech or consumer startup you would come across—the firm aggregates and standardizes factories, particularly small factories spread across the length and breadth of India. Think of it as the Oyo of the industrial world. Zetwerk generates demand from large companies, like Larsen & Toubro (L&T), Tata Steel, and Bharat Heavy Electricals. These orders—let’s say to make 1,000 precision parts that will go into an aircraft—are next routed to the right manufacturers in its network. Manufacturers quote their prices and the work is finally sub-contracted. Such a process helps Zetwerk offer competitive costs to customers and ample capacity. Well, Zetwerk also runs its own factories in emerging sectors such as consumer electronics—while it aggregates factories, the company is also a contract manufacturer itself.