Keychain, a U.S. startup that helps consumer brands find manufacturing partners, has raised $30 million in fresh funding as it looks to scale its India-based development team to drive growth in North America.
While headquartered in New York, Keychain operates as a distributed company with its core engineering and product development centered in India. The startup is doubling down on this model with the new funding, aiming to grow its engineering, product design, and analytics teams in Gurugram from 35 to 70 in the coming months, and to around 100 within a year. This India-based team already represents half of Keychain’s 70-person global headcount, with about 20 employees in New York and the remainder in Austin, handling partnerships, go-to-market, and sales.
The strategy is deliberate. Despite only serving Western markets, Keychain has built its primary development operations in in Gurugram — which is the country’s second-largest tech hub after Bengaluru — to develop its consumer packaged goods (CPG) platform for clients in North America. The software platform already helps eight of the top 10 retailers, including 7-Eleven and Whole Foods, and seven of the top CPG brands, such as General Mills, connect with potentially suitable manufacturers, according to the startup. So why India?
“It’s the talent, depth, availability, and the speed with which you can access talent of that depth and availability [in India],” said Oisin Hanrahan, co-founder and CEO of Keychain, in an interview.
Hanrahan co-founded Keychain in 2023 with Umang Dua — his co-founder at Handy, a home services software startup later acquired by Angi — and Jordan Weitz. Dua, who is originally from New Delhi, has been a “natural advantage” in building Keychain’s core teams in Gurugram, Hanrahan said.
Keychain co-founder and CEO Oisin Hanrahan Image Credits:Keychain
Both Hanrahan and Dua spent time structuring Keychain’s teams across India and the U.S., ultimately ch …