Manufacturing supply chain startup Keychain raises $30 million in round led by Wellington Management, BoxGroup

New York-based Keychain—a platform that connects consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies with suppliers of packaging material and other raw materials—has raised $30 million in a funding round led by private equity (PE) firm Wellington Management and venture investor BoxGroup, the company’s founder, Umang Dua, told ET.

Existing investors, including Lightspeed, also participated in the round.

Launched in 2024, the startup works with CPG companies across the food and beverage, health supplements, and beauty and healthcare industries, with plans to broaden both its sectoral and geographic reach. Currently, Keychain is fully focussed on the North American market, primarily the US, where both its customers and suppliers are located.


Including the latest funding, Keychain has now raised a cumulative $68 million in capital. This round valued the startup at significantly higher than its last $250-million valuation, which was ascribed during a $5-million fundraise in January this year.

“If you walk into any store in the US, the number of packaged products on any of these shelves has exploded over the last five to 10 years. Until a few decades ago, a lot of the retailers manufactured their own products, but today 100% of the goods rely on some third-party element for manufacturing or in the broader supply chain,” Dua said, adding that the CPG market in the US is $1 trillion in size, of which nearly half is food and beverages, which is Keychain’s biggest target.

He pointed out that in the existing system, traditional brokers control access to market information, as a result of which the cost of goods ends up rising, with them capturing higher margins.

Dua and his cofounder, Oisin Hanrahan, had founded in 2011 a US-based home services startup, Handy, providing an offering similar to India’s Urban Company. Handy was acquired by rival ANGI Homeservices in 2019. Following their exit from Handy in 2021, Hanrahan and Dua launched Keychain, along with a third cofounder, Jordan Weitz.

Top retailers and CPG brands, including 7-Eleven, Whole Foods, Hershey’s, and General Mills, use Keychain’s offering, Dua said.

While the company is focussed on the US market for its services, Keychain has a presence in India through 30 employees in its engineering, product, and tech teams located in Gurugram—a number that it is looking to double over the next months.

“Opportunistically, over the next few years, we plan to bring a global platform,” he said, adding that an India expansion remained on the cards in the long term. “India is a huge market…any market where there is a lot of consumption and information for manufacturers on suppliers is hard to come by, lends itself to a product like ours,” Dua added.

Keychain is looking to invest the capital in funding its expansion across geographies and industries. In the near term, Keychain is building an AI-native enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, called KeychainOS, to allow manufacturers and suppliers to manage process aspects of their businesses such as purchasing, production, and inventory management.

Unlike traditional ERP systems like Oracle, QAD, or Plex, which take months or years to implement and then require add-ons to be usable, KeychainOS deploys in days and is purpose-built for the CPG industry, Dua said, adding that a bulk of the startup’s investment will go into this.

Since launching, Keychain has onboarded around 20,000 brands and retailers and claims to facilitate more than $1 billion in manufacturing projects monthly through its platform.